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This is such a ridiculous characterization - it takes many negative consequences of Uber's business (which are admittedly real effects of its operations) and th
by Reubend 5y ago
This is such a ridiculous characterization - it takes many negative consequences of Uber's business (which are admittedly real effects of its operations) and then uses exaggerated language to demonize them.
Did cities drop the ball on improving public transport? Or did, as the article claims, Uber cause a "lost decade of transit activism"?
Did restaurants fail to stay profitable during the biggest pandemic of modern history? Or maybe "thousands of locally owned restaurants will not survive the pandemic thanks to [Uber's] parasitic conduct"?
Is Uber's former CEO a disgraced businessman with a sex harassment scandal and some shady political ties? Or is he "one of the worst people alive today", accompanying brutal dictators, human traffickers, and genocidal warlords?
I would really prefer if the author just described all the reasons why they think Uber is a bad company, without acting like it's destroying society. There's plenty of bad stuff to talk about, so there's no need to exaggerate here.
- Reubend 5y agoI want to add another note: there's no evidence for this piece's assertion that they knew self driving wouldn't work out. There are still many large companies investing in this area - Waymo, Cruze, Tesla etc. The fact that Uber's program clearly failed in retrospect doesn't mean that it was a scam. You can even look at Lyft, which was doing a similar program, as evidence that there were several companies with similar ideas to create a robo taxi fleet, all of whom did some analysis that showed it could be possible. With that said, if someone had magically made me CEO of Uber at that time, I would have immediately scrapped their self driving program and just tried to negotiate an exclusive licensing deals with someone like Waymo who seemed to be farther ahead.