7 ms·

On the flipside, I, for one, view Uber’s regulatory maneuvering in a much more positive light. After all, thinking about the “spirit of the law” can lead to a v

by crabasa 10y ago

On the flipside, I, for one, view Uber’s regulatory maneuvering in a much more positive light. After all, thinking about the “spirit of the law” can lead to a very different conclusion: the purpose of taxi regulation, at least in theory, was not to entrench local monopolies but rather to ensure safety. If those goals can be met through technology — GPS tracking, reputation scoring, and the greater availability of transportation options, particularly late at night — then it is the taxi companies and captured regulators violating said spirit. I agree with this. Taxi regulations might have started with noble intentions, but quickly evolved into protecting a monopoly at the expense of consumers.

rm_-rf_slash 10y ago
There's civil disobedience to unjust laws and there's giving no fucks about the legal system. Your argument is basically valid, but fails to account for Uber's consistent violations of law at several levels of government and geographic areas.
- JoshTriplett 10y ago
  "consistent" is exactly what you'd hope for when attempting to systematically demonstrate an improvement that a class of regulations prevents; "consistent" here means alignment with a clear goal, focusing on the things that achieve that goal, and treating every restriction preventing that goal in the same way. The article suggests, and I'd agree, that the problem wasn't Uber avoiding or ignoring taxi regulations; the problem was them applying that same gleefully transgressive attitude towards other areas that had nothing to do with their goal.
st3v3r 10y ago
While true, that still doesn't justify Uber's actions. Uber doesn't give a crap about those regulations, or reforming them. In fact, they want them to stay in place so they can have an unfair advantage.
- ergothus 10y ago
  Absolutely true. But just like we shouldn't forgive Uber their sins because they improved the market, nor should we condemn their market changes because of their wrongdoing. And "caring" is something almost no companies do. Even in pure capitalism, companies don't WANT competition. They don't CARE about their consumers - they just want to make as much money as they can.
FussyZeus 10y ago
Uber's biggest problem is the confrontational way they've expanded their business, often thumbing their nose at regulators the entire time and pissing off a lot of the local communities. Lyft is in the exact same business but you don't see headlines every other day about Lyft going to war with some city or another. I think Uber's about to be a very expensive lesson about Karma and will hopefully show some of these VC babies that "move fast and break stuff" is a great strategy for software, and a terrible strategy for people.
- zeveb 10y ago
  > Uber's biggest problem is the confrontational way they've expanded their business, often thumbing their nose at regulators the entire time and pissing off a lot of the local communities. I think regulators' attitude is just as controversial: 'you must do this because we say so,' not 'you must do this because it's a good idea.'
  - FussyZeus 10y ago
    I don't see why it's suddenly up for debate whether companies need to abide the letter of the law. Origin of the law is irrelevant, if you disagree with a law you can campaign to have it changed. Corporations should not be allowed to violate the law to execute their business model.
    - chillacy 10y ago
      We break many laws every day without consequence and often with necessity (speed limit on freeways in large cities for instance). Law isn't quite so straightforward. The Myth of The Rule of Law: http://faculty.msb.edu/hasnasj/GTWebSite/MythWeb.htm http://faculty.msb.edu/hasnasj/GTWebSite/MythWeb.htm I'd wager that most corporations are violating one law or another, without any complaints from the people.
      - notyourwork 10y ago
        That isn't justification to say because we break law X all the time we can also break law Y. Flawed logic.
brudgers 10y ago
Maybe at the expense of consumers, but not necessarily to the detriment of citizens.
- civilian 10y ago
  What's the difference? Please elaborate. As I see it, there are only a few citizens who benefitted-- those involved in the ownership of taxi companies & medallions.
  - comicjk 10y ago
    Other people on the road benefitted, at least in some places. A major reason for taxi regulation in NYC was to reduce road congestion - they calculated that adding more taxis would increase the average travel time. Now Uber has upended this. I think that pricing congestion directly would be better, but in the absence of that, this is an example of Uber hurting some citizens who are not taxi companies.
    - Apes 10y ago
      The road congestion theory is a backwards rational -- someone was trying to come with reason for why medallions should still exist and came up with it. There's no way that anyone in 1937 had congestion in mind when they were creating the taxi medallions; to call it a "major" reason for why tax medallions were created is completely absurd. To cite road congestion as being part of the "spirit" of why taxi medallions were created leaves me with the impression of someone being disingenuous.
      - galdosdi 10y ago
        > There's no way that anyone in 1937 had congestion in mind when they were creating the taxi medallions What on earth makes you assert this? The intense and (to modern eyes) borderline insane levels of traffic congestion in NYC at the dawn of the automobile age are very well documented. There are pictures and videos you can easily find, that make today's horrible congestion look bearable and civilized. A lot of traffic rules and devices have their dawn in the same era.
freshflowers 10y ago
That's just a bullshit excuse. Uber attacked healthy markets with proper consumer protection, and more importantly: wider social protection. And it did so with blatantly illegal tactics that were clearly detrimental and socially undesirable. Uber is just a criminal organization acting solely out of greed.
- fosk 10y ago
  > healthy markets Taxies are a regulated monopoly, definitely not a healthy market. Hordes of consumers moved to a better alternative like Uber at the first chance they had. > Uber is just a criminal organization acting solely out of greed. Uber, whether you like it or not, has revolutionized personal transportation for better. Consumers are using Uber because Uber is a better product. That's a fact.
- slantview 10y ago
  I deleted Uber after all of this, but You are wrong. I lived in SF during 2010-2012 and calling taxis was a huge pain. I started using Uber when it was only black cars because they showed up. I would call yellow cab and after an hour they didn't even show up, so I called them again and they said "well, if you didn't see a car after 20 mins, you should have called back." I had another experience in LA in 2014 where I got yelled at by a taxi driver because HIS card reader was broken and my credit card was flat so he couldn't use the old style imprint. The taxis can suck it. They are unclean, expensive, and have irrational drivers that think they can push around their customers because they know there was no need to improve due to regulation. While I support Lyft now instead of Uber, the ride sharing business is just the competition the industry needs to shake it's complacency.
  - amyjess 10y ago
    > I had another experience in LA in 2014 where I got yelled at by a taxi driver because HIS card reader was broken and my credit card was flat so he couldn't use the old style imprint. > The taxis can suck it. They are unclean, expensive, and have irrational drivers that think they can push around their customers because they know there was no need to improve due to regulation. Unfortunately, these Taxi drivers are now working for Uber and Lyft. I take Lyft a lot (and I used Uber for a while but went back to Lyft after reading Susan Fowler's post); I've been riding for about two and a half years, and I typically take dozens of rides a month. Most drivers I've dealt with are perfectly pleasant people, but I've encountered a few who are just horrendous. I'm fairly sure most of these people are former cab drivers. Some examples: - At my last job, there were multiple drivers who insisted on parking a block away and making me walk to their car, typically through an unlit area at night. This was in a suburban office park, not a crowded city street; there was no excuse to make me walk, and over time I developed a theory that it's because I'm a woman and they want to assert their dominance. I always cancel when they pull this shit, and I eventually memorized their names and began cancelling every time someone with a history of this accepted one of my requests. - One of the above was particularly bad. This was pretty early on, and it was one of the only times I actually walked over to him. As soon as I got in the car, he started yelling "You kept me waiting for three minutes!". I then said "I was expecting you to come to where I actually am". He then told me to get out. As I was getting out, I told him I was reporting him to Lyft, at which point he said "Yeah, well I work for myself" (people like him are why I just want Uber and Lyft to declare their drivers as employees and not contractors). As I was walking back to my office building to call another, I see his car double back towards me. As he pulls into the parking lot, I start walking faster, and he gets out of his car and chases me into the building. Luckily, I got into the elevator before he could, took it up to where I worked, and told my boss what happened. My boss called 911, we waited until the cops made sure he was gone before I left again, and then a co-worker gave me a ride home. - Driver once stopped at a street corner before picking me up and texted me demanding to know my destination address. When I told him I already put my destination into the system, he cancelled on me. - A few drivers think it's acceptable to drive out of the way and get gas after they accept the ride, before picking me up. I cancel on them. One of them, after I cancelled on him, drove up to my house about 10 minutes later while I was waiting outside for the driver I called after I cancelled on him and said "Hey you, you called a ride?". I screamed and went back inside. I came within a hair of calling the cops. - One driver kept a logbook of every passenger's name plus their source address and destination address. He was perfectly pleasant to talk to, but that logbook creeped me out. - Back when I was new to Lyft, I thought I had to stay in the car while I rated and tipped the driver after the ride (I think this was when Lyft was still operating on a donation model in Dallas). Of course, my phone was acting slow then (it was a recurring problem with my old Nexus 5), so it was taking a while. During this time, the driver repeatedly screenshotted the Lyft app on his phone with my profile picture visible and kept asking over and over how much Lyft charged me for the ride. I found it creepy, so I just kept lying to him and saying that the screen hasn't loaded yet. It gets weirder. He dropped me off at a bar, and my usual MO at that bar was to get a drink at the bar and then go out on the patio. When I got to the patio, he was still parked in the same spot he dropped me off at, and he was staring at me with my drink on the patio, so I went right back inside. Seriously frightening. I hope he wasn't fapping to the screenshots he took of my profile picture. - I had a driver pick me up from home to take me to a bar. He went to the wrong place, and I tried to give him instructions, but his English was word salad, and he couldn't understand me when I gave basic directions like "keep driving forwards", either. Somehow he made it to my place. As I was getting in the front seat, he screamed at me "Hey I'm up here! Get in back!" at the top of his lungs. It was the only coherent thing I ever heard from him. I let him drive me there just so I could 1-star him (he was already at 4.5, which was below Lyft's termination threshold). - One guy made me sit in the back for no reason (I hate sitting in the back, and making me sit in the back guarantees no higher than a 3-star rating unless they end up being a spectacular conversationalist). On the way, he made a wrong turn into an express toll lane. Because of that, we ended up having to go out of our way to get out of the express lane and double back to where we were supposed to be going. While in the express lane, he starts going into an angry rant about how he's trying to run a business here but we keep dinging him with tolls. Another reason why Lyft needs to give up on the idea of classifying drivers as contractors; every driver I've seen who treats being a driver as running their own business has been a terrible person. - One guy made me ride in the back because he had the insides of the back doors and the backs of the front seat plastered with advertising for his private driver service. If I knew at the time that was a violation of Lyft's TOS, I would've reported him. - One guy parked at a hospital across the street from where I was. I called to tell him my location... he said "I'm at the hospital.", I said "I'm not. I'm at..." and then before I could tell him where I am, he barked out "Call another!" and cancelled. I was glad, actually. I rode with him once before that; he had a really creepy van, and he made me ride in the back in a pretty creepy way (he opened the automatic sliding door as I was walking up to him), so I was actually glad I didn't have to ride with him again. I don't remember why I didn't 3-star him the first time I rode with him. I think I just forgot to rate him at all. - Some of them just don't know how to make conversation. I've had more than a few, after picking me up at my office building, just bark out "What kind of building is that!?". They say it in a tone like they're interrogating an enemy spy, and they seem to not know what a multi-tenant office building is. Normal people don't do that. Normal people ask "Just getting off work?", sometimes followed by "So, what do you do for a living?", and that usually leads to pleasant conversation. Not "What kind of building is that!?" spoken like they're about to get out the waterboard if I don't answer fast enough. - I've had a small handful of drivers lately who insist on blasting violent gangsta rap on the radio, and they get upset when I ask them to turn the radio off. One of them, though, was the worst. This guy just turned it down a little, and when I said "I asked you to turn it off", he said "hey, I turned it down, what more do you want?". I made him let me off right there, and because he was using his sister's Lyft account (a huge violation of their policies; I wouldn't have gotten in at all if I'd paid attention to the name and face on the Lyft profile before I got in), I called their Critical Response Hotline and reported him. Based on the response I got from them, I'm fairly sure both he and his sister got banned from the platform. - One Uber driver blatantly ran a red light with me in the car. It wasn't even yellow when he was approaching, he didn't even try to slow down when the light turned yellow, and it was red for a few seconds by the time he entered the intersection. I wrote up a nice long report for that one. - One woman flipped her shit when I politely asked her to not use Waze. Waze's algorithm is actually incapable of getting me home (it insists on cutting through a gated community I don't have access to). It's not uncommon for drivers to use Waze, and when I say "please don't use Waze", other drivers have no problems letting me manually guide them. This lady, though, had a full on temper tantrum. She started screaming at me saying "Waze is all I have" and "I can't turn it off" (bullshit; I've had lots of drivers close the app). She even punched the steering wheel. She also said "you'll have to guide me then!" in the nastiest, most angriest way possible. I have no problems whatsoever manually guiding people, but the way she said it made it sound like manually guiding her was offensive. I asked her to let me out, and as soon as I got out, I called the Critical Response Hotline. I've never seen a driver so immature and so nasty; I wonder if she was on meth. The person I talked to was just as shocked and horrified as I was.

by crabasa 10y ago

rm_-rf_slash 10y ago

There's civil disobedience to unjust laws and there's giving no fucks about the legal system. Your argument is basically valid, but fails to account for Uber's consistent violations of law at several levels of government and geographic areas.

JoshTriplett 10y ago
"consistent" is exactly what you'd hope for when attempting to systematically demonstrate an improvement that a class of regulations prevents; "consistent" here means alignment with a clear goal, focusing on the things that achieve that goal, and treating every restriction preventing that goal in the same way. The article suggests, and I'd agree, that the problem wasn't Uber avoiding or ignoring taxi regulations; the problem was them applying that same gleefully transgressive attitude towards other areas that had nothing to do with their goal.

st3v3r 10y ago

While true, that still doesn't justify Uber's actions. Uber doesn't give a crap about those regulations, or reforming them. In fact, they want them to stay in place so they can have an unfair advantage.

ergothus 10y ago
Absolutely true. But just like we shouldn't forgive Uber their sins because they improved the market, nor should we condemn their market changes because of their wrongdoing. And "caring" is something almost no companies do. Even in pure capitalism, companies don't WANT competition. They don't CARE about their consumers - they just want to make as much money as they can.

FussyZeus 10y ago

Uber's biggest problem is the confrontational way they've expanded their business, often thumbing their nose at regulators the entire time and pissing off a lot of the local communities. Lyft is in the exact same business but you don't see headlines every other day about Lyft going to war with some city or another. I think Uber's about to be a very expensive lesson about Karma and will hopefully show some of these VC babies that "move fast and break stuff" is a great strategy for software, and a terrible strategy for people.

zeveb 10y ago
> Uber's biggest problem is the confrontational way they've expanded their business, often thumbing their nose at regulators the entire time and pissing off a lot of the local communities. I think regulators' attitude is just as controversial: 'you must do this because we say so,' not 'you must do this because it's a good idea.'
- FussyZeus 10y ago
  I don't see why it's suddenly up for debate whether companies need to abide the letter of the law. Origin of the law is irrelevant, if you disagree with a law you can campaign to have it changed. Corporations should not be allowed to violate the law to execute their business model.
  - chillacy 10y ago
    We break many laws every day without consequence and often with necessity (speed limit on freeways in large cities for instance). Law isn't quite so straightforward. The Myth of The Rule of Law: http://faculty.msb.edu/hasnasj/GTWebSite/MythWeb.htm http://faculty.msb.edu/hasnasj/GTWebSite/MythWeb.htm I'd wager that most corporations are violating one law or another, without any complaints from the people.
    - notyourwork 10y ago
      That isn't justification to say because we break law X all the time we can also break law Y. Flawed logic.

brudgers 10y ago

Maybe at the expense of consumers, but not necessarily to the detriment of citizens.

civilian 10y ago
What's the difference? Please elaborate. As I see it, there are only a few citizens who benefitted-- those involved in the ownership of taxi companies & medallions.
- comicjk 10y ago
  Other people on the road benefitted, at least in some places. A major reason for taxi regulation in NYC was to reduce road congestion - they calculated that adding more taxis would increase the average travel time. Now Uber has upended this. I think that pricing congestion directly would be better, but in the absence of that, this is an example of Uber hurting some citizens who are not taxi companies.
  - Apes 10y ago
    The road congestion theory is a backwards rational -- someone was trying to come with reason for why medallions should still exist and came up with it. There's no way that anyone in 1937 had congestion in mind when they were creating the taxi medallions; to call it a "major" reason for why tax medallions were created is completely absurd. To cite road congestion as being part of the "spirit" of why taxi medallions were created leaves me with the impression of someone being disingenuous.
    - galdosdi 10y ago
      > There's no way that anyone in 1937 had congestion in mind when they were creating the taxi medallions What on earth makes you assert this? The intense and (to modern eyes) borderline insane levels of traffic congestion in NYC at the dawn of the automobile age are very well documented. There are pictures and videos you can easily find, that make today's horrible congestion look bearable and civilized. A lot of traffic rules and devices have their dawn in the same era.

freshflowers 10y ago

That's just a bullshit excuse. Uber attacked healthy markets with proper consumer protection, and more importantly: wider social protection. And it did so with blatantly illegal tactics that were clearly detrimental and socially undesirable. Uber is just a criminal organization acting solely out of greed.

fosk 10y ago
> healthy markets Taxies are a regulated monopoly, definitely not a healthy market. Hordes of consumers moved to a better alternative like Uber at the first chance they had. > Uber is just a criminal organization acting solely out of greed. Uber, whether you like it or not, has revolutionized personal transportation for better. Consumers are using Uber because Uber is a better product. That's a fact.
slantview 10y ago
I deleted Uber after all of this, but You are wrong. I lived in SF during 2010-2012 and calling taxis was a huge pain. I started using Uber when it was only black cars because they showed up. I would call yellow cab and after an hour they didn't even show up, so I called them again and they said "well, if you didn't see a car after 20 mins, you should have called back." I had another experience in LA in 2014 where I got yelled at by a taxi driver because HIS card reader was broken and my credit card was flat so he couldn't use the old style imprint. The taxis can suck it. They are unclean, expensive, and have irrational drivers that think they can push around their customers because they know there was no need to improve due to regulation. While I support Lyft now instead of Uber, the ride sharing business is just the competition the industry needs to shake it's complacency.
- amyjess 10y ago
  > I had another experience in LA in 2014 where I got yelled at by a taxi driver because HIS card reader was broken and my credit card was flat so he couldn't use the old style imprint. > The taxis can suck it. They are unclean, expensive, and have irrational drivers that think they can push around their customers because they know there was no need to improve due to regulation. Unfortunately, these Taxi drivers are now working for Uber and Lyft. I take Lyft a lot (and I used Uber for a while but went back to Lyft after reading Susan Fowler's post); I've been riding for about two and a half years, and I typically take dozens of rides a month. Most drivers I've dealt with are perfectly pleasant people, but I've encountered a few who are just horrendous. I'm fairly sure most of these people are former cab drivers. Some examples: - At my last job, there were multiple drivers who insisted on parking a block away and making me walk to their car, typically through an unlit area at night. This was in a suburban office park, not a crowded city street; there was no excuse to make me walk, and over time I developed a theory that it's because I'm a woman and they want to assert their dominance. I always cancel when they pull this shit, and I eventually memorized their names and began cancelling every time someone with a history of this accepted one of my requests. - One of the above was particularly bad. This was pretty early on, and it was one of the only times I actually walked over to him. As soon as I got in the car, he started yelling "You kept me waiting for three minutes!". I then said "I was expecting you to come to where I actually am". He then told me to get out. As I was getting out, I told him I was reporting him to Lyft, at which point he said "Yeah, well I work for myself" (people like him are why I just want Uber and Lyft to declare their drivers as employees and not contractors). As I was walking back to my office building to call another, I see his car double back towards me. As he pulls into the parking lot, I start walking faster, and he gets out of his car and chases me into the building. Luckily, I got into the elevator before he could, took it up to where I worked, and told my boss what happened. My boss called 911, we waited until the cops made sure he was gone before I left again, and then a co-worker gave me a ride home. - Driver once stopped at a street corner before picking me up and texted me demanding to know my destination address. When I told him I already put my destination into the system, he cancelled on me. - A few drivers think it's acceptable to drive out of the way and get gas after they accept the ride, before picking me up. I cancel on them. One of them, after I cancelled on him, drove up to my house about 10 minutes later while I was waiting outside for the driver I called after I cancelled on him and said "Hey you, you called a ride?". I screamed and went back inside. I came within a hair of calling the cops. - One driver kept a logbook of every passenger's name plus their source address and destination address. He was perfectly pleasant to talk to, but that logbook creeped me out. - Back when I was new to Lyft, I thought I had to stay in the car while I rated and tipped the driver after the ride (I think this was when Lyft was still operating on a donation model in Dallas). Of course, my phone was acting slow then (it was a recurring problem with my old Nexus 5), so it was taking a while. During this time, the driver repeatedly screenshotted the Lyft app on his phone with my profile picture visible and kept asking over and over how much Lyft charged me for the ride. I found it creepy, so I just kept lying to him and saying that the screen hasn't loaded yet. It gets weirder. He dropped me off at a bar, and my usual MO at that bar was to get a drink at the bar and then go out on the patio. When I got to the patio, he was still parked in the same spot he dropped me off at, and he was staring at me with my drink on the patio, so I went right back inside. Seriously frightening. I hope he wasn't fapping to the screenshots he took of my profile picture. - I had a driver pick me up from home to take me to a bar. He went to the wrong place, and I tried to give him instructions, but his English was word salad, and he couldn't understand me when I gave basic directions like "keep driving forwards", either. Somehow he made it to my place. As I was getting in the front seat, he screamed at me "Hey I'm up here! Get in back!" at the top of his lungs. It was the only coherent thing I ever heard from him. I let him drive me there just so I could 1-star him (he was already at 4.5, which was below Lyft's termination threshold). - One guy made me sit in the back for no reason (I hate sitting in the back, and making me sit in the back guarantees no higher than a 3-star rating unless they end up being a spectacular conversationalist). On the way, he made a wrong turn into an express toll lane. Because of that, we ended up having to go out of our way to get out of the express lane and double back to where we were supposed to be going. While in the express lane, he starts going into an angry rant about how he's trying to run a business here but we keep dinging him with tolls. Another reason why Lyft needs to give up on the idea of classifying drivers as contractors; every driver I've seen who treats being a driver as running their own business has been a terrible person. - One guy made me ride in the back because he had the insides of the back doors and the backs of the front seat plastered with advertising for his private driver service. If I knew at the time that was a violation of Lyft's TOS, I would've reported him. - One guy parked at a hospital across the street from where I was. I called to tell him my location... he said "I'm at the hospital.", I said "I'm not. I'm at..." and then before I could tell him where I am, he barked out "Call another!" and cancelled. I was glad, actually. I rode with him once before that; he had a really creepy van, and he made me ride in the back in a pretty creepy way (he opened the automatic sliding door as I was walking up to him), so I was actually glad I didn't have to ride with him again. I don't remember why I didn't 3-star him the first time I rode with him. I think I just forgot to rate him at all. - Some of them just don't know how to make conversation. I've had more than a few, after picking me up at my office building, just bark out "What kind of building is that!?". They say it in a tone like they're interrogating an enemy spy, and they seem to not know what a multi-tenant office building is. Normal people don't do that. Normal people ask "Just getting off work?", sometimes followed by "So, what do you do for a living?", and that usually leads to pleasant conversation. Not "What kind of building is that!?" spoken like they're about to get out the waterboard if I don't answer fast enough. - I've had a small handful of drivers lately who insist on blasting violent gangsta rap on the radio, and they get upset when I ask them to turn the radio off. One of them, though, was the worst. This guy just turned it down a little, and when I said "I asked you to turn it off", he said "hey, I turned it down, what more do you want?". I made him let me off right there, and because he was using his sister's Lyft account (a huge violation of their policies; I wouldn't have gotten in at all if I'd paid attention to the name and face on the Lyft profile before I got in), I called their Critical Response Hotline and reported him. Based on the response I got from them, I'm fairly sure both he and his sister got banned from the platform. - One Uber driver blatantly ran a red light with me in the car. It wasn't even yellow when he was approaching, he didn't even try to slow down when the light turned yellow, and it was red for a few seconds by the time he entered the intersection. I wrote up a nice long report for that one. - One woman flipped her shit when I politely asked her to not use Waze. Waze's algorithm is actually incapable of getting me home (it insists on cutting through a gated community I don't have access to). It's not uncommon for drivers to use Waze, and when I say "please don't use Waze", other drivers have no problems letting me manually guide them. This lady, though, had a full on temper tantrum. She started screaming at me saying "Waze is all I have" and "I can't turn it off" (bullshit; I've had lots of drivers close the app). She even punched the steering wheel. She also said "you'll have to guide me then!" in the nastiest, most angriest way possible. I have no problems whatsoever manually guiding people, but the way she said it made it sound like manually guiding her was offensive. I asked her to let me out, and as soon as I got out, I called the Critical Response Hotline. I've never seen a driver so immature and so nasty; I wonder if she was on meth. The person I talked to was just as shocked and horrified as I was.