5 ms·

By "disruption", you mean skipping the insurance, background checks, and licensing to carry passengers? This isn't innovation. It's gypsy cabs with an iPhone

by pico303 12y ago

By "disruption", you mean skipping the insurance, background checks, and licensing to carry passengers? This isn't innovation. It's gypsy cabs with an iPhone app.

toolz 12y ago
I trust ratings by the general public a lot more than I trust some authority that I've never heard of deciding some person is fit for driving a cab. Corruption is a thing that happens with authority figures and while you can bribe the general public, it's not like the person bribing the public won't recognize their own benefit to just being a better driver. There is much more incentive to not suck when you have daily ratings as opposed to whatever the limit is for taxi cab drivers.
- emodendroket 12y ago
  Are you being serious? Have you ever looked at Yelp reviews?
  - toolz 12y ago
    Yes..? Yelp has some great reviews. I'm looking at pictures of dishes from my local restaurants and the scenery around them right now from a reviewer. Which appointed agency would you rather have tell you what food is good/bad? The local health boards?! Don't make me laugh, I worked in a sit down restaurant for years and every single inspection was a quick walk through followed by a free meal we'd give the inspector and a high rating. This wasn't one store. This is every single store I worked at in multiple restaurants across three different cities and two different health departments.
    - emodendroket 12y ago
      I don't agree with Yelp reviewers' taste in restaurants, but they host reviews of lots of other services too, and their reviews of the service has been somewhere between "not correlated" and "inversely correlated" with the actual service I've had.
ghshephard 12y ago
"Licensing to carry passengers" is definitely something I want to see disrupted. There is no value to me, or others, from having the the driver "licensed to carry passengers." It certainly doesn't provide any assurance of quality (as indicated by the horrible drivers and customer service one gets from Taxi Drivers on the Peninsula). I think it's entirely reasonable to require Insurance, Background Checks, Car Safety Checkups (from a third party), Drivers Valid License - Basically anything that is in place to protect consumer safety, instead of there to protect incumbents market ownership. For example - in London, acquisition of "The Knowledge" is not there to protect consumers, it's there to reduce the amount of competition. I would absolutely not require "The Knowledge" prior to anyone becoming a Lyft/Uber driver. And, as one who has taken thousands of taxi-rides, I can tell you that Uber/Lyft are not just innovation, they are mind-blowing revolutionary disruptive innovation to this industry. They are a much bigger deal for cab rides, than the iPhone was for the smart phone.
- jamespo 12y ago
  Mind-blowing? Really?
  - minthd 12y ago
    If taken to their limit(including sharing of trips), the economics would work so well that we could be talking about something that could replace the personal car in many many cases. That would be revolutionary.
  - ghshephard 12y ago
    Yes - mind blowing. Perhaps because I've taken thousands of taxi rides, that even a hundred Uber/Lyft rides later, I still can't comprehend how wonderful it is to just push a button and see a car pull up. I wasted so much of my life waiting for taxis, many of whom never showed up, many of whom showed up 30 minutes late, and sometimes were never available - that Uber/Lyft just continue to blow my mind. Easily the most exciting use of my iPhone.
- Jare 12y ago
  > There is no value to me, or others, from having the the driver "licensed to carry passengers." The value is in that the license can be taken away if the owner does not comply with the appropriate requisites for the activity. The relationship between a taxi driver and their passenger extends way beyond the mere act of driving, so the driver's license is not enough.
lhnz 12y ago
No, by disruption he probably means becoming a multi-billion dollar business, not to an anti-regulatory stance. Could Uber have succeeded if they had tried to follow all of the regulations like Hailo did? And by innovation, he probably doesn't refer to the slur that you did by calling their workforce "gypsies" but to the resource locality problem solved by an app.
- jkaunisv1 12y ago
  FWIW, "gypsy cab" is a general term for illegal cabs. I would argue that the use of the word gypsy is actually a slur against Romani people. I'm a little confused by your comment as you seem to be implying that a gypsy is a bad thing and it's thus offensive to the drivers to be called gypsies. I hope I'm misinterpreting because that's like getting mad at Alice for calling Bob a n*, not for using a racist slur, but because it compares Bob to a black person.
  - invisible 12y ago
    When someone uses a slur in a negative connotation like pico did it is usually considered offensive. I really don't get how lhnz calling out the ugliness of that comment is bad on him.
    - jkaunisv1 12y ago
      I agree, it is offensive. It wasn't clear to me that lhnz was calling out the ugliness of pico's comment. The way his comment was worded sounded different to me. Like he was saying "how dare you insult someone by calling them a gypsy", not "gypsy is an insensitive slur". I'm having a hard time articulating that properly. My comment was meant to ask clarification, not as an accusation.
      - lhnz 12y ago
        Uber's innovation was in removing a hails requirement for a mutual line-of-sight between the passenger and a cab. This increases the number of cabs accessible to a user. It also allows cabs to move towards users, which is analogous to providing an index to speed up a locality of reference problem in a computer [0]. It is an innovation that works on purely economic grounds. He was insinuating that Uber's innovation was cheap workers and then slurring these as "gypsies". It's easier to point out somebody's smear than it is to describe their misunderstandings related to innovation and domain knowledge, so my attack was on his method not his content. [0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Locality_of_reference http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Locality_of_reference Edit: You can't honestly downvote me based on a discussion from first principles of why something was innovative or can you? Sigh. As a response to your original post, I would argue that the term gypsy is widely considered derogatory, and that I was not saying "how dare you call somebody a gypsy". I was saying that I felt that he was purposefully using it as a derogatory smear. I think it's fair to assume that he was using it as a smear and I think it's interesting that you wish to defend him by accusing me of the same thing that I accused him of. You're perverting my intention which was to point out that he was normalising a smear as a negative externality to defending his anti-Uber beliefs and that this isn't okay.
baddox 12y ago
Yes, gypsy cabs, jitneys and share taxis were innovative and disruptive.

by pico303 12y ago

By "disruption", you mean skipping the insurance, background checks, and licensing to carry passengers? This isn't innovation. It's gypsy cabs with an iPhone app.

toolz 12y ago

I trust ratings by the general public a lot more than I trust some authority that I've never heard of deciding some person is fit for driving a cab. Corruption is a thing that happens with authority figures and while you can bribe the general public, it's not like the person bribing the public won't recognize their own benefit to just being a better driver. There is much more incentive to not suck when you have daily ratings as opposed to whatever the limit is for taxi cab drivers.

emodendroket 12y ago
Are you being serious? Have you ever looked at Yelp reviews?
- toolz 12y ago
  Yes..? Yelp has some great reviews. I'm looking at pictures of dishes from my local restaurants and the scenery around them right now from a reviewer. Which appointed agency would you rather have tell you what food is good/bad? The local health boards?! Don't make me laugh, I worked in a sit down restaurant for years and every single inspection was a quick walk through followed by a free meal we'd give the inspector and a high rating. This wasn't one store. This is every single store I worked at in multiple restaurants across three different cities and two different health departments.
  - emodendroket 12y ago
    I don't agree with Yelp reviewers' taste in restaurants, but they host reviews of lots of other services too, and their reviews of the service has been somewhere between "not correlated" and "inversely correlated" with the actual service I've had.

ghshephard 12y ago

"Licensing to carry passengers" is definitely something I want to see disrupted. There is no value to me, or others, from having the the driver "licensed to carry passengers." It certainly doesn't provide any assurance of quality (as indicated by the horrible drivers and customer service one gets from Taxi Drivers on the Peninsula). I think it's entirely reasonable to require Insurance, Background Checks, Car Safety Checkups (from a third party), Drivers Valid License - Basically anything that is in place to protect consumer safety, instead of there to protect incumbents market ownership. For example - in London, acquisition of "The Knowledge" is not there to protect consumers, it's there to reduce the amount of competition. I would absolutely not require "The Knowledge" prior to anyone becoming a Lyft/Uber driver. And, as one who has taken thousands of taxi-rides, I can tell you that Uber/Lyft are not just innovation, they are mind-blowing revolutionary disruptive innovation to this industry. They are a much bigger deal for cab rides, than the iPhone was for the smart phone.

jamespo 12y ago
Mind-blowing? Really?
- minthd 12y ago
  If taken to their limit(including sharing of trips), the economics would work so well that we could be talking about something that could replace the personal car in many many cases. That would be revolutionary.
- ghshephard 12y ago
  Yes - mind blowing. Perhaps because I've taken thousands of taxi rides, that even a hundred Uber/Lyft rides later, I still can't comprehend how wonderful it is to just push a button and see a car pull up. I wasted so much of my life waiting for taxis, many of whom never showed up, many of whom showed up 30 minutes late, and sometimes were never available - that Uber/Lyft just continue to blow my mind. Easily the most exciting use of my iPhone.
Jare 12y ago
> There is no value to me, or others, from having the the driver "licensed to carry passengers." The value is in that the license can be taken away if the owner does not comply with the appropriate requisites for the activity. The relationship between a taxi driver and their passenger extends way beyond the mere act of driving, so the driver's license is not enough.

lhnz 12y ago

No, by disruption he probably means becoming a multi-billion dollar business, not to an anti-regulatory stance. Could Uber have succeeded if they had tried to follow all of the regulations like Hailo did? And by innovation, he probably doesn't refer to the slur that you did by calling their workforce "gypsies" but to the resource locality problem solved by an app.

jkaunisv1 12y ago
FWIW, "gypsy cab" is a general term for illegal cabs. I would argue that the use of the word gypsy is actually a slur against Romani people. I'm a little confused by your comment as you seem to be implying that a gypsy is a bad thing and it's thus offensive to the drivers to be called gypsies. I hope I'm misinterpreting because that's like getting mad at Alice for calling Bob a n*, not for using a racist slur, but because it compares Bob to a black person.
- invisible 12y ago
  When someone uses a slur in a negative connotation like pico did it is usually considered offensive. I really don't get how lhnz calling out the ugliness of that comment is bad on him.
  - jkaunisv1 12y ago
    I agree, it is offensive. It wasn't clear to me that lhnz was calling out the ugliness of pico's comment. The way his comment was worded sounded different to me. Like he was saying "how dare you insult someone by calling them a gypsy", not "gypsy is an insensitive slur". I'm having a hard time articulating that properly. My comment was meant to ask clarification, not as an accusation.
    - lhnz 12y ago
      Uber's innovation was in removing a hails requirement for a mutual line-of-sight between the passenger and a cab. This increases the number of cabs accessible to a user. It also allows cabs to move towards users, which is analogous to providing an index to speed up a locality of reference problem in a computer [0]. It is an innovation that works on purely economic grounds. He was insinuating that Uber's innovation was cheap workers and then slurring these as "gypsies". It's easier to point out somebody's smear than it is to describe their misunderstandings related to innovation and domain knowledge, so my attack was on his method not his content. [0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Locality_of_reference http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Locality_of_reference Edit: You can't honestly downvote me based on a discussion from first principles of why something was innovative or can you? Sigh. As a response to your original post, I would argue that the term gypsy is widely considered derogatory, and that I was not saying "how dare you call somebody a gypsy". I was saying that I felt that he was purposefully using it as a derogatory smear. I think it's fair to assume that he was using it as a smear and I think it's interesting that you wish to defend him by accusing me of the same thing that I accused him of. You're perverting my intention which was to point out that he was normalising a smear as a negative externality to defending his anti-Uber beliefs and that this isn't okay.

baddox 12y ago

Yes, gypsy cabs, jitneys and share taxis were innovative and disruptive.