This will probably be an unpopular opinion, but I actually thought the driver was exceedingly rude. He clearly took advantage of Kalanick being in the public eye, and thus a "target". Filming him without acknowledging it was totally immoral, it should reduce any fair person's bayesian priors as to the credibility of the driver.
I'm no fan of Kalanick, but I thought he comported himself reasonably, taking the time to explain things from his perspective. He could have just said: "sorry no time". Instead he shook the driver's hand, tried to explain the logic of his moving down the luxury scale.
The fact that the footage of him with two women wasn't cut out is frankly disgusting and a total invasion of his privacy. He didn't do anything wrong except flirt a bit. How tawdry of Bloomberg to show that material.
What is wrong with newspapers nowadays? It seems the press decides someone's "fair game" and they just engage in the most blatant character assassination.
Kalanick's opinions and behaviour are obviously of interest to the public right now. There are quite a few anecdotes that, taken together, paint the picture of a thoroughly chauvinistic CEO with a bit of social darwinism thrown in for good measure.
His comments here further that impression: he throws around jingoism in his awkward attempt to impress his companions ("every year is hard for Uber...") and is either uninformed or dishonest with regards to the driver's complaints.
The "footage of him with two women" could not be cut out because it is the entirety of this video. It's necessary both to prove the identity as well as adding context and body language.
The women aren't identifiable and him being out & about with two women could have been observed by anybody, and was probably observed by the people at whatever Super Bowl event he was visiting.
It's also hard to judge this without remembering that Uber employees had, for years, full access to any customer's ride data, and often used it for fun & stalking. They boasted about their ability to algorithmically tag "rides of glory", set out to punish a journalist by digging up private information about her, and collect data about user's positions not directly required for their actual service.
I fail to see how this is character assassination. It's a primary source – the video itself carries the meaning, and if that is damaging to his reputation, then the flaws are his and not something made up by any journalists. Likewise, I ain't reducing anyone's "bayesian priors" because the driver's credibility is completely irrelevant. He's not making any relevant statements of fact beyond those visible in the video.
It's amazing that someone who tried to deceive poor people into taking subprime loans in pursuit of his monopolistic dumping scheme, chooses to scream "personal responsibility" at a bankrupted immigrant.
And the first thing people do is debate the ethics of recording him.
Out of curiosity, what's his involvement with "monopolistic dumping scheme"?
Looking through his Wikipedia (ok, not a fantastic reference source ;) ) entry, there doesn't seem to be any mention of involvement (employment/directorships/etc) with financial institutions.
Uber's business model is to create a monopoly on a variety of transportation services using VC cash to dump the market, drive out their competitors, and then jack up prices:
I get it, context is everything. So yes, given the current climate, it seems initially acceptable to show the entire video.
The problem is, I can't help but wonder if the current context for Uber, puts such emphasis on Kalanick's behavior, that even a normal night out with 2 women is judged negatively. I mean let's face it, he really didn't do anything wrong in the video. He flirted a bit, and tried to have a reasonable discussion with the driver.
When the conversation got out of hand, he left.
It's sad how often people with pitch forks look to even the most normal of behavior, to crucify someone.
> "Kalanick's opinions and behaviour are obviously of interest to the public right now.
Not really. Uber's actions are, certainly, but the opinions and actions of the CEO in his personal life are only of interest here because technology executives are the celebrities of Hacker News readers.
Well what do you know, at the time of writing this, it's the top comment!
> The fact that the footage of him with two women wasn't cut out is frankly disgusting and a total invasion of his privacy. He didn't do anything wrong except flirt a bit. How tawdry of Bloomberg to show that material.
It's relevant because he said things like this:
“That’s kind of how I roll. I make sure every year is a hard year. If it’s easy I’m not pushing hard enough.”
at a time when we're supposed to be trusting that Kalanick is fixing his company's culture...
> the most blatant character assassination
Where was the character assassination? They just reported on what happened in the video. The video is relevant to the public interest. Do you have a right to not be filmed in an Uber... maybe? I don't know. It's not my car, and the driver could need the film for their own protection. I think I would be okay with being filmed as long as it wasn't secret.
I'm not sure you're right, legally speaking. At the very least it's a grey area. I certainly have the "reasonable expectation of privacy" (the legal test) in a hotel room that I don't own - a hired car doesn't seem that different to me. When you see an actor get into a car to avoid the paparazzi - they rarely own the car, and reasonably expect the driver not to film them and upload to TMZ or something. (IANAL, TINLA)
Uber cars aren't technically owned by a business like a hotel is though. If you stay the night at my house, there's a DVR system in some of the rooms. Deal with it.
Edit: Also, you probably are being filmed elsewhere in any major hotel (lobby, halls, etc). And I've seen plenty of that footage end up on TV.
Again though, you're not applying the proper legal test. The law isn't "who owns the property you're on" or "is the property owned by a business or individual," it's "do you have the 'reasonable expectation of privacy' on that property?" The former may factor into the latter, but it's not as cut-and-dried as your comments would make it seem.
Uber's position is that its ride sharing, and that's why the drivers are employees. Arguing that they have a reasonable expectation of privacy now that it would benefit Travis is just arguing out of both sides of the mouth.
I have to say, that would be interesting, as my conversations are not usually relevant to the readers of bloomberg. I might not be happy about it, but I'm not sure that a law was broken or that I would have any recourse...
That doesn't make it right. Clearly you would not be happy about it either.
I think the interesting part of this story is not Kalanick's character based on the video, but rather the business decisions Uber made and how that has impacted their drivers.
It appears Uber has benefited from people investing in fancy cars. If it was their business plan to mislead people into doing that and then force them to take Uber X rides, then that is wrong, though not illegal.
Whether I would be happy about it or not does not make it right either. My unpopular opinion is that this video is in the public interest and that matters more than whether or not the CEO of Uber is happy about it or feels like their privacy was violated.
I don't support the idea that our culture would be better off by sharing more videos of each other when we did not expect we'd be speaking to the entire world.
It's why we don't get to see Trump's or Congress' tax returns without some kind of court case.
If they're forced to do it by law, it will be forced upon you too, and boom, everyone knows all your financials.
We can decide what we want to add to our culture. Secret videos don't need to be part of it.
Another unpopular opinion here: I think people in power should be held to a higher standard than lowly peons like me.
Imagine yourself as the driver. If the video had never been published, he would never have even gotten an apology from Kalanick. I sympathise with those who don't have the kind of power that the CEO of of Uber does. He is a serf in the hellish gig economy that Kalanick has made himself a billionaire many times over. This is the most meaningful political impact he will probably ever make in his life. Kalanick, meanwhile, will probably be okay, even if this leads to a chain of events where he is fired.
I want to choose a kind of culture where the working class are not so powerless against the rich. Just because one thinks it should be the law for the president to release their tax returns, doesn't mean that they think every single person should be subject to such an invasion of privacy for no reason.
If I happened to be CEO of a ~ $60 billion company, you're damned right that I'd be okay with Bloomberg publishing a video that brought both my character and competence into question.
There is no such thing as privacy when you get to be that big. And frankly, any leader competent enough to run a business that big should already know that.
Exactly, even if there was no video, the driver could have written a viral medium or Facebook post and quoted his words. A conversation with one of your "employees" is not private!
Apropos of nothing all of the sites that talk about driving for Uber seem to recommend a recording setup both a dash cam and 'passenger cam' to provide backup in the event of a dispute or accident. I would be really surprised if he didn't expect this to be recorded at some level.
What makes you say that? The camera looks like it's in a place where you should be able to see it. Either way, I don't think a conversation I have in the back of someone else's car is private.
Because I find it incredibly hard to believe that he would engage like this if he believed there was a possibility of the conversation being made public. Sure, I could be wrong, but I am of the camp that the driver will find legal repercussions to this.
> Travis is right on a technicality they did not lower Uber Black prices much if any. What they did instead was coerced Uber Black drivers to take Uber X request. Yes drivers can reject Uber X request, but if you reject a certain amount of Uber rides, they kick you off their system. Probably why the driver is complaining about going bankrupt, you need a luxury car to drive Uber Black, but if you're stuck picking Uber X fares you'll lose money.
> Travis is right on a technicality they did not lower Uber Black prices much if any. What they did instead was coerced Uber Black drivers to take Uber X request.
That seems like semantics to me. The pay was lowered.
Why are you both unaware that the rate itself was in fact lowered. Straight from the article:
> In 2012, Uber Black cost riders $4.90 per mile or $1.25 per minute in San Francisco, according to an old version of Uber's website. Today, Uber charges $3.75 per mile and $0.65 per minute.
If the consumers are voting with their wallets that they want more Uber X rides and less Uber Black rides, well, that's what should happen. To bring supply back in line with demand, some drivers who used to drive Uber Black should either leave or downgrade, and if they won't do it willingly, then some drivers going bankrupt is a way how the market forces "driver supply" to go in the direction where it apparently needs to go.
Sure, but the way Uber is set up means the costs from that adjustment are bourne entirely by the driver, who was probably advised by Uber to take our a lease on an expensive luxury car in order to pick up expensive fares.
Bear in mind the start of this thread was discussing the driver being rude. You can call it "market forces" as much as you like, but if Uber is happy to sit back and let its drivers pay the price, its CEO can expect to be given a hell of a lot of abuse in return. And he'll deserve it. Don't expect to be treated well when you don't treat others well.
This is the free market. Uber Black is one thing, but you do know Uber is aggressively working towards autonomous vehicles, because Uber wants to provide transportation in the future, and not just now. A $69 billion dollar company must always be thinking of the long term if they want to stay relevant.
Uber isn't a charity. I don't condone Uber's culture or whatever the CEO may or may not have done to create such a workplace but you have to understand that Uber is a business, like any other, out to maximize profits. Everyone seeks to maximize profits, and if the market calls for changes, then you make those changes lest you give up market share to your competitors.
No, but it functions in a society, and shouldn't be under the mistaken belief that it is immune to societal change.
We can all agree that self-driving cars and automation in general are a positive technological development. But what if it results in mass unemployment? It's short sighted to say that Uber only has to seek to maximise profits - it also has an interest in there being a large customer base with money available to use their product. Presumably it would also prefer that those customers are not rioting and trashing vehicles in the street.
This is a mini version of that. Uber has screwed over this driver, and he is justifiably angry about it. "Well, we'd lose market share if we don't do it" is not a winning argument to anyone except other advantaged rich people.
Let's keep in mind that Uber Black was meant to be a replacement for renting limousine by the hour. It was meant to take something that used to be $135/hour with a 5 hour minimum, and turn it into $50 per 30 minute ride so limousine owners could profit off their spare time.
This is hardly something that is for the common man, and has little to do with self-driving cars or automation.
Private car services offer 4 seater and SUVs as well as the typical looking limo. That's what most of their business is... Driving people to and from locations like nightclubs in SUVs.
Uber is not immune to societal change, they fully embrace this, like any company must if they want long term success.
Every corporation seeks to maximize profits. They may make investments, but every company expects a positive return on those investments in the long term.
I think we are responsible for our own actions. No one forced this driver to use Uber. Uber and Lyft always had very open relationship in the sense that drivers routinely double dipped in the pool without legal issues. There is absolutely no expectation that the terms under which the drivers are operating are set in stone and they aren't going to change in the future.
You have to look at things within the legal framework. $97k is a lot of money and people sue for much much less. That driver probably had no case at all.
By that token, their drivers aren't charity workers either. If we put aside the inter-personal aspect of the video (which is contentious to say the least) this, to me, espouses the fundamental flaw in Uber's approach to their business: they have no respect for their workforce.
Unless they can get their self-driving cars working in time (which is another contentious subject), I suspect their eventual failure if it comes will be due to how they treat their drivers. Personally, I use Lyft because (a) in SF Lyft and Uber availability is more or less fungible and (b) I got tired of Uber drivers giving me an earful on how badly Uber treats them. Lyft drivers, in my experience (which is anecodtal, but I take at least 5 Lyfts per week and often 10+) are reasonably happy about their work. After the recent news I went ahead and deleted my Uber account, but that was an easy decision to make since I never use them anyway.
It's not a problem if their driver recruitment material reflects that. If the message was "Drive a black car for occasional UberBlack fare, beware that you must accept a certain percentage of lower UberX fares, and that at some point you will be replaced by a driverless vehicle", it's truth in advertising and drivers get what they sign up for.
Driver ads, however, display successful-looking models quoting some unrealistic (as frequently pointed out by quite a few news sources) dollar amounts, and let's face it, the clientele it's targeting is very removed from robotics/AI development, unlikely to have an economics degree (or speak fluent English, for that matter) or disposable income to trade up / trade down their vehicle of choice to reflect the strategy of the day.
Your argument can be rewritten to apply to Countrywide Mortgage and fake Viagra peddlers, does that make those businesses right?
In a properly functioning market, drivers would be going bankrupt due to not having enough fares, not by being forced to take unprofitable fares.
If customers are voting with their wallets that they want more UberX and less Uber Black, then Uber Black drivers should be faced with a choice of chasing volume or margins, not forced to subsidize customers.
They're not being forced to take unprofitable fares, though. They're being offered UberX customers when there are no Uber Black customers available. Whether or not they have the ability to change that priority is the question here. It seems that taking a slightly lower fare is better than taking no far at all at a higher rate.
> It seems that taking a slightly lower fare is better than taking no far at all at a higher rate.
That is not how capitalism works. Uber drivers are responsible for both fixed and variable costs. The marginal revenue of a fare might be less than the marginal cost and the decision to accept a fare needs to be made by the driver. If Uber drivers do not have the ability to make revenue management decisions they cease to be contractors. Uber is misleading its drivers and the IRS by labeling its drivers as contractors and passing losses onto them.
They get marked as inactive which they accept, and go back to their normal business of being a private limo service for the wealthy at $135/hour.
Uber Black in Washington D.C. is basically exclusively run by private limo operators driving Escalades. Owners of recent model $70,000+ cars are not your typical Uber driver, and do have other sources of income.
Almost every Uber black driver I've taken has handed me their card and proceeded to upsell me on their services outside of Uber.
That's not true with Uber Black. If you refuse an Uber X fare as an Uber Black driver, you're just marked as inactive temporarily (as you've declined a legitimate customer when there were no Uber Black customers). You can mark yourself as active again and take fares, but you are not forced to take Uber X fares as an Uber Black driver.
If it's as seamless as you describe it to be, it's not an issue. An external source here https://pando.com/2014/09/04/uber-continues-to-screw-its-par... claims "Uber drivers are required to maintain a minimum 80 percent ride acceptance rate to remain in the company’s good graces – the best performers exceed 97 percent, the company tells its drivers. Ignore too many inbound ride requests when you are the closest vehicle and the result could be some combination of reprimand/probation, lost bonus income, or, in extreme cases, deactivation of the driver’s account".
I don't have any personal experience driving, would be nice to have a clarification on that.
This only applies to drivers that decline fares in their current rate class. Standard Ubers, Uber XLs, etc. Uber Black drivers that decline UberX fares when there are no Uber Black customers are simply marked as inactive. They can set themselves as active again and accept fares again almost immediately. If they continue to do so, then there is a wait time simply because they're not offering the service they're contracted to do and they're creating a longer wait time for Uber customers.
IANAL but my understanding is that this sort of are claiming Uber drivers are employees vs. contractors. If they are contractors then they should be able to refuse rides from a different class freely and without any sort of punishment.
I'm following till "without any sort of punishment", there I'm lost. If I have a contract with a gardener that is servicing me for watering my yard, but then I also need to have my lawn mowed. If I ask him about providing this service and he declines, what's wrong with finding another gardener willing to provide the service I need?
I agree with you but I wonder if a court might say it's more like hiring a gardener to water your flowers and then when he doesn't want to change your flat tyre you cancel the contract. At the end of the day though short term/casual contracts are cancellable. I don't think anyone wants a world where you can't get rid of contractors when you want or need to.
In that specific case he might still be ruled a contractor, sure.
But if you expanded the list of duties to be sufficiently large and indefinite ("gardening and whatever else I need"), then a court might rule that you have created an employment relationship and are responsible for providing various other benefits.
So it would seem to favor the "employee" classification if Uber had a long history of "oh, and you also need to take these other requests ... oh, and support spotify integration now ... oh and you have to auto-accept requests before you're done with the current."
What a bizarre way of looking at it. There's vastly more economy class passengers on a plane; but it doesn't mean that first or business passengers don't exist.
You are right that some drivers going bankrupt is how the market would correct, but forcing them to take uberx fares at below cost is a dreadful idea and definitely not free market economics. If anything, it's like a govt regulation that requires businesses to do some stuff below cost to still be in the game.
Im not disagreeing, can you explain why (or point me to reading material)? If customers aren't traveling business, won't the airline company either have to give away seats or keep them empty?
Uber works so that each seat (or pair, or row of seats) is operated by a single driver, mostly at their own personal risk – with the operator of the plane controlling a lot of the equation.
Normal airlines assume an aggregate risk of the entire demographic and seasonalities of air travel. If customers suddenly stop traveling business, the airline can do something about it (lower prices, improve service, better marketing, and so on). With the Uber model, there's not so much a single driver can do, but they carry a lot of the risk.
I'm not sure I follow as to why they have to accept Uber X requests. If there is less supply for Black cars, what's wrong with them sitting idle? What if they miss a request for a black car while they are driving their uber x customer around?
I don't think that is a good reason to say they are employees.
What happens when you look at it like this; A Uber driver must accept some % of request sent their way (any class), but if you want to be sent uber black request then you must have an appropriate car.
I feel like you are looking at it from a top down view, vs a bottom up view. I am not saying ether view is right or wrong. I just find it hard to follow the logic to how that makes them employees.
But I have struggled with the employee argument from the start, so I am a bit bias at this point.
A big part of why I think people feel the way you do is because the system is programmed, and automated. If i was a guy looking for contractors to do jobs for me naturally people who were more consistently available and that I have worked with in the past would get jobs before people who can only be available "whenever". The only difference is that was some sort of decision I made in my head vs a system who had thresholds programmed.
What I feel like uber has done is automated the process of hiring contractors for on the spot jobs. And somehow people don't like the automation of it, or the rules. I feel like the solution is simple. Don't drive for uber if you don't like the terms. Go get a taxi medallion if you want to make your own rules, or drive for one of the competitors.
Behavioral Control 1a (the relevant argument I am making), 1b (Black drivers have specific types of cars), 1f
Type of Relationship 11
> What I feel like uber has done is automated the process of hiring contractors for on the spot jobs.
That is not true because Uber dictates the pricing. In fact you as the passenger are not hiring the contractor. If you look at it from a per-ride-transaction perspective it is actually one more reason why Uber drivers are employees (Financial Control 7, Uber limits the extent to which a driver can realize a profit on an individual ride).
Looking at Uber drivers as being contracted by the passengers does not make sense.
All good points. Thanks. I had not considered that way before.
I think 1a and 1f are the strongests points. I do feel 1b is a bit of a stretch. I don't think somebody becomes an employee because they require you to use a hammer and not a rock to push nails into wood when building a house. While that is not the best analogy I think you should be able to expect the contractor to show up to work with the right tools to do the job.
I would really like to see a system that was more like a real time Angie's list. In such when ride request came in drivers made bids, and requesters could pick from the bids. The bids might also have information about distance from pickup location (or expected pickup ETA, along with price). Maybe have a default setting to pick lowest bidder and shortest ETA. But other things like car styles or types could be part of the system too.
In any case thank you for your reply. You have given me some things to think about.
> I don't think somebody becomes an employee because they require you to use a hammer and not a rock to push nails into wood when building a house. While that is not the best analogy I think you should be able to expect the contractor to show up to work with the right tools to do the job.
This is actually a relevant distinction for the building trades. A contractor will have their own nail gun with a brand-specific feeding system, or might even choose to use an impact driver in certain circumstances. When a construction firm requires all its subcontractors to have a particular model of nail gun that would be an argument for them being employees.
> I would really like to see a system that was more like a real time Angie's list. In such when ride request came in drivers made bids, and requesters could pick from the bids. The bids might also have information about distance from pickup location (or expected pickup ETA, along with price). Maybe have a default setting to pick lowest bidder and shortest ETA. But other things like car styles or types could be part of the system too.
This was how a lot of people expected Internet commerce to work in the early 1990s - the research term for it was agents/multi-agent systems. The passenger would have their agent put out a call for bids for a ride from one location to another. The driver's agents would reply with bids and the passenger agent would take the lowest one. The driver's agent would base the bid on some function that could take into account things like distance, predicted driving time based on current traffic conditions, predicted mileage cost based on MPG estimates based on data from the car's OBDII sensor data, etc.
That would be a market system. Uber and Lyft are a duopoly from the point of view of passengers and monopsonies from the point of view of drivers.
I think this is where the crux of the disagreement is. They can decline fares for UberX requests and I don't think it counts against them. Normal Uber drivers will get kicked off the system if they decline too many fares but I don't think that applies to Uber Black drivers that get shifted to UberX.
Here's a comparison. With advertisement sales, often companies will say you must provide at least X impressions, even if we won't guarantee premium pricing for you.
Sometimes, maybe even most of the time, you'll get a high CPM (like Uber Black). Sometimes you'll get a low CPM (compare this to Uber X). Regardless, you have to do X amount of business with them or else they drop you.
Sometimes this means taking higher quality traffic (thus potentially higher CPM), and funnelling it to a certain advertiser at a lower rate simply to maintain your impression level.
That doesn't make web site owners, employees of ad companies even if they're solely dependant on a single ad company for their livelihood.
UberBlack drivers never signed up to accept UberX fares. That wasn't part of the contract, which is why so many feel cheated, an equivalent of a cable company selling you a promotional $19.99 rate and then upping it to $79.99 once you bought the equipment.
> To bring supply back in line with demand, some drivers who used to drive Uber Black should either leave or downgrade
Sure, or some passengers who used to want a cheaper UberX but find it unavailable should either resort to alternative methods or upgrade to UberBlack - market equilibrium can be found in either direction.
> This will probably be an unpopular opinion, but I actually thought the driver was exceedingly rude. He clearly took advantage of Kalanick being in the public eye, and thus a "target". Filming him without acknowledging it was totally immoral, it should reduce any fair person's bayesian priors as to the credibility of the driver.
Why? If I were a driver, you can be sure I would be filming everyone. Does that mean I would have no credibility?
Here in London I've assumed that cabs are always filming.
> And the gig has gotten harder for longtime drivers. In 2012, Uber Black cost riders $4.90 per mile and $1.25 per minute in San Francisco, according to an old version of Uber's website. Today, Uber charges $3.75 per mile and $0.65 per minute. Black car drivers get paid less and their business faces far more competition from other Uber services.
Considering that he did change the price from under the driver, and that is very likely what did indeed bankrupt the guy, I don't blame him from acting out in any way he can.
The fact that the CEO just screams out "BULLSHIT" when he points out the price decrease which affected him and that his only response just makes me lose respect for him completely.
He's only saying "bullshit" to the guys claim they were originally making $20/mile... Sounds like from info you posted that both the $20 and the $2.75 per mile claim are completely wrong.
Kamel: “We started with $20.”
Kalanick: “Bullshit.”
Kamel: “We started with $20. How much is the mile now, $2.75?”
In the UK specifically, it would fall under the Data Protection Act. You need to make sure that the data (video) is used fairly and lawfully and for a defined purpose. In this case, the purpose of collection is safety, not for publishing on Bloomberg.com.
> The statute applies to "confidential communications" -- i.e., conversations in which one of the parties has an objectively reasonable expectation that no one is listening in or overhearing the conversation. See Flanagan v. Flanagan, 41 P.3d 575, 576-77, 578-82 (Cal. 2002). A California appellate court has ruled that this statute applies to the use of hidden video cameras to record conversations as well. See California v. Gibbons, 215 Cal. App. 3d 1204 (Cal Ct. App. 1989).
If there's a reasonable expectation of privacy, all parties must consent to the recording.
> Filming him without acknowledging it was totally immoral,
To me this is a very classist oppinion. Normal people are filmed as they take the bus, ride the subway, go on the elevator, walk through the graveyard (seriously), go shopping, so why should a rich person who can afford a cab be granted an exclusive right to privacy which the rest of us don't have? If we promote this case due to the expectation of privacy that only serves to create this devide between rich and poor in which only the rich can afford privacy rather than a precident in which everyone deserves it.
"Normal people are filmed as they take the bus, ride the subway, go on the elevator, walk through the graveyard (seriously), go shopping, so why should a rich person who can afford a cab be granted an exclusive right to privacy which the rest of us don't have?"
What are you talking about? Normal, non-rich people totally have the same expectation of privacy when they take a cab. Would YOU be ok if your cab driver films you without any knowledge? A taxi/uber/lyft is a rented private car, it is not the same as public transportation.
usually they have signs that say so. It's illegal to not notify your passenger that they are being filmed. It's possible that this driver had signs (but no way to know from just the video).
A lot of TNC drivers have cameras pointed into the car, some (but not all) with signs indicating the passenger is being filmed. It is even more standard in real taxis. The expectation of privacy is more that such footage in any of the mentioned circumstances would never be released unless it captured someone committing a crime or something similar.
Subways, buses etc. are public spaces. A car is not, and unless the driver had a prominent sign conveying that everyone is being recorded, it is definitely an invasion of the reasonable expectation of privacy.
You're allowed to film people without their permission if they enter your property, or are in a public arena for security purposes. But _publishing_ that film is strictly immoral and illegal in many jurisdictions.
Also, while it's perfectly okay for the driver to tell Travis what his concerns or pain points are, it's rather rich of him to assume that he has any context to tell Travis what business decisions make sense. As if Uber won't have charged higher prices if they could get away with it.
The CEOs being disconnected with the masses is bad, but so is the masses assuming that somehow THEY know just the right thing the CEO should have done without being privy to any of the data that a CEO has access to.
It's not too different from the arrogance you see on HN.
Right, the driver didn't even know what the current Uber Black fair was...falsely claiming it was $2.75. Anyone would get annoyed when someone was telling you that you were essentially doing your job wrong but didn't even know the basic facts. In this case, these facts have a direct impact on the driver, which makes it all the more inane that he doesn't know them.
You seem really intent on defending Kalanick here so I will only post this as a reply to one of the several similar comments you've made regarding this:
> Travis is right on a technicality they did not lower Uber Black prices much if any. What they did instead was coerced Uber Black drivers to take Uber X request. Yes drivers can reject Uber X request, but if you reject a certain amount of Uber rides, they kick you off their system. Probably why the driver is complaining about going bankrupt, you need a luxury car to drive Uber Black, but if you're stuck picking Uber X fares you'll lose money.
You can't force contractors to take lower fare rides and then still claim the high ground of "we didn't lower your fares to X"
Are you certain that's the case? I was under the impression that, while this is true for the normal classes of Uber, the UberX fares for Uber Black drivers do not count against them if they reject the fare and UberX rides are only offered to them if there is not a current Uber Black fare available in the area.
That's fair enough and I see that point. My intent is not to defend Kalanick, but I do instinctually defend free markets. I think Uber and its drivers found itself in a situation with falling demand amidst rising competition.
It's fair to assume that Uber could have not lowered the prices in exchange for a smaller market share. Which would have been a pretty good arrangement for existing drivers.
This will probably be unpopular as well. I think Travis overreacted and lacked empathy with the driver, but the driver didn't seem to understand that TK doesn't control market forces, and doesn't "have the business model in his hand". Uber was doing well with Black Cars, but the company did the right thing by undercutting its own market so that it could survive and grow. There's also nothing wrong with "giving every person a ride", rather than limiting Uber to just black cars for the riches. Uber adapted to market forces, the driver didn't, and then he blamed the company for his problems.
Maybe teaching economics in primary school could solve this problem.
Gee how are you going to catch anyone doing something immoral if you warn them before they do it? Not sure what you are trying to say about bayesian priors, but when you say untrue things it ruins your credibility. Not sure why people are upvoting you. Yeah, bad people hate it when you talk about the things you do. Fortunately, like the PewDiePie incident, famous people can't ruin others just because they are upset they reveal the things they do.
> What is wrong with newspapers nowadays? It seems the press decides someone's "fair game" and they just engage in the most blatant character assassination.
You're peering through time with rose-colored glasses.
American history is littered with instances using the press to smear and undermine the oppositions, whoever it may be.
The Founding Fathers, a number of them with close ties or financial stakes in printing press businesses, used it regularly to peddle an agenda.
Appearance and opinion have long mattered. Because they are really the only things we have on which to judge. Everyone has their own personal view and influencing that is the goal. Not truth. Never in the history of the nation has actual truth-seeking been the goal of the powers that be in politics or media.
Ideas like we're now in a "post-truth" world are bizarre. It's nearly a truism of the species to use a pedestal to smear enemies and endear to us our fans.
A relative of mine was a chief of a fire department. During a nasty contract battle, he had people picketing his home -- a miserable experience for his family at the time.
But... he was a public figure and the protestors were on a public sidewalk.
When you're a public figure that carefully nurtures a bad-boy, asshole image and attitude of privacy bordering on contempt, you shouldn't expect kid gloves.
Immoral perhaps, but not necessarily illegal. Does anyone know where this took place? I wasn't 100% certain from the article. Many U.S. states have a single-party consent wiretapping law, which permits this kind of surreptitious recording.
Every taxi I've taken in the last 5-6 years has built in cameras that film both the back seat and the passenger before pickup. There notices but I don't believe you can assume privacy from the driver when it's not a limo with the screen up or something similar.
There are legitimate reasons why this is done in a taxi: preventing people running away from payment, engaging in harassment or other bad behavior, or claiming you refused to pick them up for reason X when you had a good reason to not pick them up. From what I know of Uber, these reasons all apply to their drivers as well.
This is exactly how entrepreneurship works - you take risks, sometimes enormous risks with huge capital investments, and it doesn't pan out. Sometimes it does work out and you reap great rewards for a long time.
The driver signed up for this and the gamble didn't work out... now he's blaming Uber?
I agree that you don't really have a right to complain when willfully you join a platform you don't control.
But driving for Uber isn't entrepreneurship. You don't control your marketing, brand, you don't acquire your own customers, no control over price or business model, etc. Drivers are really just cogs in the service, provide a car, drive the routes, get paid.
I mean entrepreneurship assuming he lost $96,000 by buying a few cars and timesharing them out to other drivers... which is starting our own small business...
driving for Uber is definitely entrepreneurship (source: Uh, I did Uber and Lyft for a year and a half, and did quite well, too). And it's also totally okay to complain about shitty contracting relationships. For example, the entrepreneurs of company X contracts a company Y to make some hardware, and the job is totally botched, but they can't do anything because a lawsuit is not worth the time/money.... I don't think it's unreasonable for X to bitch about Y since that provides a useful signal to others to not make the same mistake.
Not identifying with Uber drivers as entrepreneurs is a very classist attitude.
The CEO of Uber is a public figure and has as much right to privacy as he gave Sarah Lacy whom he let Uber stalk her and family for a negative article.
He is a ruthless, greedy, ignoramus, misogynistic pig who needs his ass handed to him and Uber to crumble before his eyes!
So those downvoting me think there is nothing wrong with having a reporter stalked, allowing your female employees to be treated like dogs... stealing your competitors IP... snubbing your nose at the law to put robot cars on the road that could kill people all for the sake of winning .. this and other horrible behavior is perfectly fine and that's why your downvoting me?
> Filming him without acknowledging it was totally immoral.
It's definitely illegal. It's not immoral to film it necessarily, it is maybe immoral to release it without permission. But at some point you have to admit that it becomes "public interest" to leak information, even if it transgresses those moral standards. As an extreme example, if you had managed to covertly film Kim Jong Un, giving insight into the inner workings of the hermit kingdom, would it be immoral to make it public?
To me this illustrates one of the biggest problems we have in america which is the crazy firewall between rich and poor. Kamel wanted to have a serious discussion with Kalanick about how his decisions as CEO were affecting Kamel's life and Kalanick gets upset about this. That's your job! At least it should be. If you can't even handle light criticism from the people you employ, you shouldn't be at the top.
Have you worked at a big company? In none of the fortune 500 companies have I met the CEO who has taken a minute to explain like Travis tried. In fact in some of the companies I worked for the CEO won't even respond to email.
I work for a gigantic corporation and you're right that the CEO wouldn't respond to me. In fact, if we were in a car together and I started talking to him about how my pay wasn't so hot this year I would expect him to be extremely uncomfortable. He should be! He makes huge decisions which affect thousands and thousands of lives. CEOs should be in constant contact with peons like me and Kamel. Maybe they would adjust their decisions so they wouldn't have to be confronted in this sort of way.
Except the CEO works for the board whose goal is to keep the company profitable so it can continue to exist.
If you are upset about pay, you go to your manager or in the case of Kamel, you go work for a competitor Lyft. You have every right to voice your complaints but don't be surprised when they fall on deaf ears.
I read something a while back (maybe here?) and I wish I could find the quote but my google-fu is failing me now, anyways it's something like this: "If the corporate structure is set up in such a way as to diffuse responsibility so thinly that no single person can actually be held responsible then the corporate structure is broken." This is a problem in many, many corporations but Uber is an extreme example. Kamel is just trying to hold someone responsible for the pay changes. Of course Kalanick is going to try to reject responsibility, it's what corporate America has taught him to do. That just seems a little messed up to me.
EDIT:
Furthermore, there is no good reason that a CEO should not work for the board as well as for their employees and their customers. Or maybe it's that the board should be looking out for their employees and customers. Either way, somebody should be listening to guys like Kamel so that outbursts like this don't have to happen.
Somewhat tangential, but if Kalanick's purpose is to make sure that Uber is profitable then he is failing at his job, considering they've lost billions of dollars quarter after quarter. And in this case, the driver can't be reasonably expected to go to Lyft because Lyft doesn't go black car services.
In a large company it simply doesn't work like that, if everyone can come to the CEO with every little problem they have then he or she is going to be fielding complaints 24/7. Griping goes up in steps - you gripe to your manager, they gripe to theirs and so on.
I showed up to uber to pick up a phone that my girlfriend at the time had left in an uber. They told me to wait in line behind the drivers. "Sir, we are all customers here."
You are contradicting yourself. The video then proves that he thinks the driver is capable of intelligent conversation. Unless you have seen videos of Travis talk to rocks, trees and bots. If so, please do share.
He was clearly off duty. Being the CEO of a company like Uber is very difficult indeed. Surely the guy doesn't have to answer to literally every single person he meets 24/7 because he is the CEO. He deserves no personal free time?
If he wanted "personal free time" without being asked questions, including some pointed ones, he probably shouldn't have taken a car from the service he owns. This person wasn't just "literally" another person, they were technically his employee/contractor and were on the clock even if he wasn't. If I was in this situation where I was working while my boss was technically not but in my presence, I feel like it would be appropriate to ask my boss questions pertaining to my work.
Nope, he get's the money because he founded a company and didn't immediately drive it into the ground.
Founders tend to maintain their seats at the table because they were the guys to originally build the table in the first place, and thus have political privilege.
He gets paid big bucks to lead a company like Uber and be held accountable by the board, not some random stranger. You seem to have some romanticized view of the world that's not congruent with reality.
> If you can't even handle light criticism from the people you employ, you shouldn't be at the top.
I ask this in all seriousness: what qualities make for a good leader assuming the ideals of capitalism? I understand many people here will say they would prefer to work for a moral leader who can handle criticism and adapt to make sure his employees are taken care of, but do those leaders perform better at growing companies quickly? I guess what I'm asking is for data - are assholes more likely to be successful CEOs? Or maybe they're better at the early stages when growing a company, or perhaps they're better at the later stages when a company needs to deal with regulations, or maybe they're always the worst. What data is there for this apart from anecdotes?
Turning that question around, what sort of a leader do you want to work for? Or folks usually like to work for? This whole idea of growing a company as the only (or most important) thing that matters is something that should die. We want people who we genuinely respect and imitate as our leaders. We want to build products that are genuinely useful and bring about a positive change in the society.
Yes, that's a personal decision in deciding where to work. But it's easy to come up with specific examples of CEOs that are assholes who grow gigantic companies. I was just using this specific example with Kalanick to raise the question. Perhaps a better example is Steve Jobs, someone who had something of a cult following but from what I've heard was an all around terrible person. If these people truly weren't tolerated, they wouldn't get to the top in the first place.
I guess some of these leaders have strengths that we probably can't easily put into words. For ex., a leader who can bring about the best from people, a leader who has a knack for understanding people, etc., I wonder how much of those other qualities played role more than them being assholes.
I'm not asking what we should do from a moral perspective, which is highly subjective. I'm asking for data. Has anyone done an analysis on the traits of successful CEOs?
There are studies that have shown that CEOs are more likely to be psychopaths than the general population. If you assume being a psychopath also makes you an asshole, and some level of success is required in order to become a CEO, it wouldn't be unreasonable to claim that being an asshole makes you more successful.
That really is an atrocious article; they compared numbers which are loosely correlated at best:
>"The study of 261 senior professionals in the United States found that 21 per cent had clinically significant levels of psychopathic traits. The rate of psychopathy in the general population is about one in a hundred."
They should have applied the same standard to both groups, but instead used a very loose definition for the professionals, and a very stringent definition for the general population.
"The Psychopath Test" is a great book on this subject, and recommended reading on it; all these popular blog posts are just meaningless polemical drivel.[1]
I can't speak to the methodology of the study in the article, but it appears that the author of The Psychopath Test found that the rate was 4x the general population[1], so I feel like the argument still stands
If you're not going to read the entire book, please at least read more of the Wikipedia article.
>He considers the book a cautionary tale against diagnosing someone without really knowing them, and about the need to avoid confirmation bias. He thinks that is "part of the reason why there are so many miscarriages of justice in the psychopath-spotting field." He does believe that Hare's construct of psychopathy applies to some people, and that their victims deserve sympathy, but is concerned about the "alarming world of globe-trotting experts, forensic psychologists, criminal profilers, traveling the planet armed with nothing much more than a Certificate of Attendance, just like the one I had.
I've placed a hold with my local library to check it out.
Until I have a chance to read it, that appears to be an argument against attempting to diagnose an individual without significant psychiatric observation, which is a noble goal. But assuming the citation of the book in the article is correct, then there appears to be a link between psychopathy and being a CEO. Is your contention that this finding is incorrect or that we need to be careful in how we interpret the finding?
It is possible that there is some connection between being a psychopath and being a CEO, but I have no good evidence of it, and it is also possible that being CEO of a large company increases anti-social behavior patterns (as a lot of people are out to get you). The interesting question is whether psychopaths are more likely to become CEOs. Your second link didn't seem to appreciate the main message that Ronson described in his book; they just made passing mention of it.
Great leaders cause their staff to grow personally and professionally; they do this by finding out what keeps the staff from becoming all they can be, and removing those barriers. This causes companies and the industry at large to grow.
E.G. We used to have a general manager at where I worked some 30 years ago who handled a time theft case this way; he brought the guy into his office with a manager, laid down the time theft amount and days time theft occurred and gave the guy two options. Walk out the door, or work and pay it back; if you choose to be dishonest we have no use for you, leave. If you choose to be honest, pay it back, show me you can be a moral person, we're even. That person chose to pay it back, and they stayed with that company some 20 additional years.
Any other quality is secondary. You don't have to know a library of algorithms or what the latest and greatest API is to be a great leader or even a competent programmer. Those things are distractions from understanding the fundamental theories and best practices of computer science anyway, and a lot of it is technological imperialism delivered through marketing to management already very aware technology needs to be inhibited for them to stay employed.
Another very large organization I worked for had a standard software they had deployed all over the organization, and one department, a lab, had a bar-coding requirement for data entry to eliminate very costly problems that traced back to the lab. It wasn't my department's job to build infrastructure for them, and they had budgetary constraints that kept them from updating. I suggested they ask the staff to change the font of the text to a bar-code font which is something after doing 5 minutes of google research, I discovered the app allowed. I closed out the ticket and referenced that as a suggestion, and gave them the ticket to reference later. Lo and behold, 2 months later, they get a estimate for $50,000. This organization is one of the biggest employers in the US, and routinely mergers with another company about once every other year. There is no leadership in their organization, and we all suffer for it.
I believe the driver was itching for a confrontation (he stopped Kalanick as he was getting out of the car to start the conversation).
It was only after being berated for a minute or two and interrupted that Kalanick's composure started to crack. Before then, I don't think anything Kalanick could have said would have mollified this driver. He had an axe and he was going to grind it. Kalanick could have handled it better, but he didn't totally melt down either.
And I think the guy is pretty terrible in general.
Where else should he grind it? Kalanick is the CEO. He made a decision which affects this mans livelihood. Kalanick certainly gets paid enough to face up to people like this. And if he wants to stop facing up to it, maybe he can do something about their pay.
> You don't get to challenge everyone in your life who makes decisions that directly or indirectly affect you.
I believe the first amendment disagrees. If you have a grievance with someone, it is absolutely within your right to tell them. In fact, I'd argue that a healthy, functional society relies entirely on people being completely honest with each other.
Hypothetically, don't you think a world where you could do that would be better? Besides this isn't exactly indirect. There is a direct line from Kalanick's decisions to this mans paycheck.
And the driver is not an employee. Yeah, I know this has been discussed a lot of times, but the way Uber is set up, there's absolutely no reason for Kalanick to give an Eff about the driver's situation.
And indeed: the loyalty cuts both ways. Uber drivers can immediately drop Uber and simply work for Lyft. They have complete and utter independence from the Uber company.
Its just the nature of how Uber has been set up. I understand the driver's frustration, but what more does the driver expect?
I'm not sure what humans you're interacting with but the CEO of Uber acted just how I'd expect myself or any of the other people I know to act when confronted by someone being antagonistic while I'm trying to go home after an evening out.
Be unhappy with him if you want but don't try to paint it as human. You either want the CEO of Uber to act like a politician or a saint, not a human.
> the way Uber is set up, there's absolutely no reason for Kalanick to give an Eff about the driver's situation.
Except, you know, "being a human"
> loyalty cuts both ways. Uber drivers can immediately drop Uber and simply work for Lyft. They have complete and utter independence from the Uber company.
That's actually not that different from being an employee, where you can usually quit on short notice and start working somewhere else as well – at least on the lower end of the market.
But it's wrong to consider these relationships as symmetrical in terms of power. Uber (or any employer) has vastly more power over an individual driver than the other way around. That's because loss of the gig can mean financial ruin for the driver, but the company wouldn't even notice it.
That's why unions are needed to create a balance of power.
I don't know whether we need unions or not - but until we do, Uber can hardly be faulted for playing the free market. The CEO has a board to answer to and they care about maximizing profits, like any other for profit organization.
Even ignoring that, by that standard, he is among the worst human being ever with around -80 billions of "profit" so far...
...and ignoring that Uber is structured specifically to make the board toothless – proof: major VCs invested in Uber have to resort to public blog posts because they can't get answers nor actions using the standard
tools of corporate governance...
...there's nothing wrong with faulting people for immoral but legal actions they take. Uber and its ilk are inflicting harm on the lower middle class by driving down the income and security of taxi drivers. The spoils go to middle-class customers (now) and VCs (theoretically, someday). Is that a good deal for society overall? Nobody knows. Wal-mart has similarly driven down prices and arguably made life easier for many people. It's also killed Main Street, created an underclass of employees earning minimum wage, and led to the consolidation of power within oligopolies in many markets.
It's not a sustainable solution because boycotts and other means of regulating companies without the power of law just don't work. But there's nothing wrong with it. In fact, it's probably a necessary on the way to actual regulation by laws.
>Uber can hardly be faulted for playing the free market.
Why? Seems like we should be holding them responsible in any way we can (even if that's just talking bad on a message board) for their bad actions. I don't know why we need to give them a pass on actions we don't deem moral just because it's legal.
If you agree that the driver is not an employee, how do you think that would have played out if TravisK had blown him off on video? Do you think everybody would see it your way, and would that be fair of them to do?
I'd have agreed with your reasoning, if Uber was a charity. But its not. If Uber didn't cut prices, Lyft would have steamrolled Uber in 2013. So, Travis is not lying when he says "they had to drop prices".
When someone tells you how to do your job better, and that someone is not even qualified to do that job, you'll also get angry.
Kalanick was off the clock, clearly on his way home and in a social setting. The driver could have really capitalized on the moment. He could have opened a productive and respectful conversation by saying he was a very early driver and had some feedback - good and bad - asking to sit down at a more appropriate time. That had far more likelihood of achieving any progress.
But maybe he didn't want progress. Maybe he just wanted the satisfaction of venting to the CEO.
I used to use Lyft and Uber interchangebly depending on where I was, but since the Susan Fowler allegations I've defaulted to Lyft. And I love the in-app tipping :), so much less awkward and more convenient.
However, I've had more borderline experiences with Lyft than Uber, mostly related to basic cleanliness of the car. Drivers have always been great though.
Travis is right on a technicality they did not lower Uber Black prices much if any. What they did instead was coerced Uber Black drivers to take Uber X request. Yes drivers can reject Uber X request, but if you reject a certain amount of Uber rides, they kick you off their system. Probably why the driver is complaining about going bankrupt, you need a luxury car to drive Uber Black, but if you're stuck picking Uber X fares you'll lose money.
This sounds a lot like mortgage crisis. There, borrowers said they didn't understand the terms of loans that had changing rates (ARMs), and banks said they didn't mislead anyone because the terms were in the contract.
These fights explain why we have government regulation and education to sort things out. We can't have the rich constantly taking advantage of the poor, and we can't have the poor be so uneducated as to not understand the risk of a NINA loan. It isn't good for the growth of the country.
I believe it simply sets you to inactive temporarily, because you're obviously not picking up rides and you're slowing down the rider matching process.
Which is absolutely wrong. They're deciding, as a contractor, to not take jobs which are not worth their time. As a contractor, they're supposed to be able to do that without punishment. If Uber is doing this, it is a punishment.
There's some balance between punishment and keeping the rider experience pleasant. I don't want to wait 10 minutes to get matched because of nearby lurking Uber Black cars passing on my Uber X request.
If a driver ignores several requests in a row, they're clearly taking a break. It's a feature, not a punishment.
I wonder if surge is activated by a lack of drivers or a lack of drivers who accept rides. My initial thought was that it was based on the number of active drivers, so making a driver inactive would take the pricing higher for the remaining drivers.
Simply? The driver never signed up for those rides in the first place.
Imagine being pitched an engineer job at an engineer salary with company later expanding into haircutting business and ducking your bonus for not generating enough haircuts.
I've never been an Uber driver, but as far as I can tell from my conversations, they do indeed sign up.
My app sometimes says there are no Uber X available in my area, but 5 or 6 Uber Black. How could that be possible unless the Black were not automatically signed up for X?
Are you sure they still do this? I haven't gotten a Black Car for an X fare in several years. Used to be fairly common, now never. Before the Susan Fowler allegations, I was a 2-3x per day rider (I'm now mostly using Lyft).
This seems like a slam piece following the #DeleteUber bandwagon.
1). The title doesn't match the contents. Instead of reporting on the specifics of the fare changes, Newcomer rehashes the more prominent Uber scandals and some short commentary on TK's "short temper."
2). A very short paragraph (around 1/20th the article) breifly elaborates on the fares:
> And the gig has gotten harder for longtime drivers. In 2012, Uber Black cost riders $4.90 per mile and $1.25 per minute in San Francisco, according to an old version of Uber's website. Today, Uber charges $3.75 per mile and $0.65 per minute. Black car drivers get paid less and their business faces far more competition from other Uber services.
3). The video transcription selectively takes out parts and fudges others:
> "Kalanick begins to lose his temper."
> Omitting the civil conversation preceding "But people are not trusting you anymore"
The following is just my personal anecdote: I have an immigrant in my family who's just like the driver. He's not interested in "fighting over a good idea, which sometimes means admitting that his isn’t the best one," but looking to assert his ideas onto anyone who takes his argument-bait.
Additionally, it's plain rude to engage in this sort of thing with a stranger.
Yeah, I get the feeling that people who have a big problem with Fawzi's tone here are really saying "you don't talk to the boss that way!" But you know, maybe you SHOULD talk to the boss that way.
> You may want to rephrase that, because it sounds an awful lot like you're attributing "stubbornness" to the fact that this guy's an immigrant.
I am. This sort of behavior is common among older people from the country my family member -- and I -- emigrated from.
> He's not a stranger. He's the boss.
That's a bit of an exaggeration. Travis isn't directly overseeing this specific driver's operations (ignoring the whole "Uber is a contractor not an employer").
Travis isn't responsible for the driver bankrupting himself. That's poor life decisions. I'd never buy a brand new luxury car just for Uber Black. I don't know the circumstances of how that driver lost $97k, but that's a lot of money to lose over Uber Black as a driver. I don't know how he did it. Whatever he did, blaming the CEO of Uber is hardly appropriate.
My uncle's like that. He has no idea in exchanging ideas, he just wants to tell you what he thinks and have you agree. It's exhausting to engage with him. When he first met my fiancee, he spent an hour telling her (a clinical geneticist) all about why vaccines are damaging. That was not fun.
Rude? This driver, rightly or wrongly so, believes this Travis guy bankrupted him by being dishonest.
I'm sure Travis can spare 10 minutes in his 70 billion dollar lifestyle if this guy's life has been ruined.
And based off what we know of Uber's values, attitudes, and CEO, the driver was probably right and Travis-bro deserves some rudeness to bring him back down to Earth.
So, let me get this straight. Uber has lowered the fair once on Uber Black to $3.75/mile, yet it seems that this driver was falsely insisting it was $2.75/mile. That would be frustrating to me too.
Honestly, as much as I don't like Kalanick and would love a reason to dislike him even more, to some degree I have to side with him on this situation.
The footage with the girls, while incredibly awkward, is nothing more than a flirtatious conversation. Now, fair enough that the driver realises he has the CEO of Uber in his car and wants to talk about his situation as a driver, and I give props to Kalanick for actually taking the time to listen and explain.
Did the ending clip not paint Kalanick in the best light? Sure, but keep in mind that in this situation he is a guy in his private life who has been blindsided and accused of ruining this guys life, with, what it seems like from other posts here, lies.
If telling the guy he needs to take responsibility for his own choices instead of looking to blame someone else is the worst thing that Kalanick could say to anyone, then there really isn't a story here from my point of view.
Also, Bloomberg should really take a good hard look at themselves for posting that video without cutting out the conversation with the women. Posting that section of the video is the kind of disgusting shit that TMZ and other gossip rags would pull.
> Sure, but keep in mind that in this situation he is a guy in his private life who has been blindsided and accused of ruining this guys life, with, what it seems like from other posts here, lies.
Oh come on, he's the CEO of Uber and he took an Uber. Probably every single Uber driver in the country if not the world knows who he is. If he doesn't have an expectation of being recognized and asked about the business he should hire non-Uber private cars. This isn't someone tracking him down on the street and sticking a mic in his face. It's completely fair game.
> Oh come on, he's the CEO of Uber and he took an Uber.
And if he took a Lyft, a private limo, or drove himself, that would be even worse publicity. Right now no matter what he does he'll get people sniping at him, just like on this board. It's a herd mentality where you pick on perceived weakness, and it's always ugly.
> Probably every single Uber driver in the country if not the world knows who he is.
Does every single McDonald's worker in the world know what the CEO looks like?
> And if he took a Lyft, a private limo, or drove himself, that would be even worse publicity. Right now no matter what he does he'll get people sniping at him, just like on this board. It's a herd mentality where you pick on perceived weakness, and it's always ugly.
I'm not saying he shouldn't take Ubers. I'm responding to the comment "he is a guy in his private life who has been blindsided". He should have every expectation that any driver he gets might ask him about the business, even harshly. It's completely fair game. It's his job to deal with it without losing his cool.
> Does every single McDonald's worker in the world know what the CEO looks like?
The cult of personality around Kalanick is huge, and he is making daily decisions in a volatile industry that directly affect the lives of tens if not hundreds of thousands of drivers. They are very likely to be following his every move in the news. In any case it doesn't matter how many drivers recognize him, all I'm saying is that he should have no expectation of privacy if he takes an Uber. Drivers are very likely to recognize him and should have every right to ask him tough questions.
> He should have every expectation that any driver he gets might ask him about the business,
I don't think he's in the public eye that way. The courts take a very specific view on who is or is not in the public eye. Also, he did engage with the driver until the driver got belligerent. Should he have just brushed off the driver with "I don't talk business during off hours?" The driver was not letting this go.
> The cult of personality around Kalanick is huge
Citation needed. I couldn't pick him out of a lineup, and I use uber daily, just like I couldn't pick the CEO of ATT out of a lineup.
Basically, the driver was behaving unprofessionally. If you were a limo driver or a waiter at a nicer restaurant, you get fired if you acknowledge the customer's status or fame at all. That sort of thing is not done and horribly intrusive.
Sure, he is a very public figure in his role as Uber CEO, but to say that he is instantly recognisable by Uber drivers is a little much. As someone who follows a lot of tech news etc this is the first time I've even seen what he looks like. What is more likely is the driver overheard the previous conversation between Kalanick and the two ladies he was with and figured it out from there.
Personally, I believe whether you're the janitor or the CEO of a company there are moments in your life which should be considered personal-life rather than "a good time to talk about your company".
And no, it isn't someone hunting him down in the street, but taking advantage of a guy, whether a person is a CEO or not, by blindsiding them with questions while they are with company and then sending the recording to a news company in a very TMZ-ish manner, irregardless of whether permission was given for filming, is as good as sticking a mic in his face and in no way is fair game.
I hope that at the end of all this, we as a society realize that we need to actually enforce, as well as update the rules we set regarding employment. We're effectively subsidizing companies that find loopholes, or simply ignore laws.
- Contractor-not-a-contractor employment merely pushes costs and risks on to the worker. We all end up paying for the worker's social safety net, and costs of doing business (Such as insurance premiums, for example).
- Not Uber-specific, but technically-not-full-time employment that just barely allows employers to bypass benefits owed to full-time employees needs to be fixed. See Walmart and how they help employees sign up for government benefits as part of their on boarding in some areas.
In the end, somebody is paying for these costs. Why shouldn't it be the companies doing business?
Interesting how it ends with "Some people don't like to take responsibility for their own actions"
We all should pay for the worker's social safety net. That shouldn't be dependant on a worker's employer, or even employment status. In the US, tying health insurance to employers was one of the worst public policy mistakes we ever made.
Not only is it tied to employers, it's subsidized! If a company gives you $1 in salary you pay taxes on that dollar. If it gives you $1 of health insurance it's tax free. It's madness.
> Why shouldn't it be the companies doing business?
Why should it be the companies doing business? Just because someone happens to work for Walmart/Uber/whoever, I don't see why it means that employer suddenly becomes responsible for meeting any particular set of needs that person might have.
If we, as a society, decide that there should be minimum standard of living for citizens than we should fund that from taxes paid by all.
> If we, as a society, decide that there should be minimum standard of living for citizens than we should fund that from taxes paid by all.
I agree, this is the other - perhaps bette - solution. But the corporations that reap huge benefits from public education, infrastructure, healthcare, etc. (and those who currently disproportionately profit from those corporations) need to start contributing their fair share.
As Mitt Romney famously said: corporations are people my friend. Which is to say, they are made up of people. Anything that is benefiting a corporation is benefiting those people. Those people pay taxes. That is how the fair share gets paid.
Tell that to Apple's 200B+ war chest, or to the profits that are distributed as dividends instead of being paid out as wages. A lot of the wealth created by corporations is not subject to income tax (only capital gains tax) and overwhelmingly benefits only those who can afford to be in the market.
> In the end, somebody is paying for these costs. Why shouldn't it be the companies doing business?
Exactly. We have allowed companies to externalize entirely too much risk/responsibility onto the public - from "too big to fail" banks to companies that use "creative" labor classification to save money on health plans and benefits to advertisers that collect reams of sensitive information but are not held to account when that information leaks.
The main problems seem to be that Uber is simultaneously in control of supply and demand and can pretty much single handedly decide the terms of the agreement between them and drivers. Basically they've created a market they are now in control of, which goes against the principles of both capitalism and socialism.
That said, it's hard to determine exactly how to prevent this from happening, and even harder to fix. My current best estimate is that either Uber needs to stop being a market and function as a full fledged company, or supply and demand should be made independent. This could be done by, for example, splitting Uber into a company advertising the services of drivers, and a separate company that buys these services for their customers. This should in theory allow for more competition.
> Why shouldn't it be the companies doing business?
Because that's not fair to those of us who work independently. Why should an "employee" get subsidized healthcare but not a struggling business owner? You're saying the only companies worth having are ones big enough to negotiate with insurance companies?
Watching as someone who already doesn't like Kalanick due to recent news, but at first, I didn't really take sides. The driver engaged first, and his tone was a little more tensive than Kalanick's. Moreover, Kalanick's argument seems sensible[0] regarding why he might have had to lower rates.
However, once Kalanick's retort essentially becomes "you're not taking personal responsibility and blaming others (ie., me)" he loses me. It's a fair discussion up till that point and each party's argument is reasonable (even if the tone isn't polite). What does Kalanick know about the driver's situation that he can say that?
When taken along with current news regarding Uber's culture, this doesn't look very good for Uber and Kalanick as a person.
[0] I'm not judging it based on its merits because I am not in the know regarding the numbers of the issue.
I don't consider it a fair discussion when the driver falsely insists the fair is $2.75/mile, when it is $3.75/mile and continues to pound the theme when Kalanick had already given his explanation. What is the driver expecting? For Uber to go back and raise fairs on Uber Black?
1) He didn't "insist" it was $2.75. He mentioned the figure once.
2) When he quoted the figure, he said "and it's now what, $2.75?" clearly implying that he's not entirely sure about the current rate.
As I admitted, I am not privy to the details you refer to. For all we know, he merely misquoted or forgot. The point I'm making is it is just a discussion until Kalanick accuses the driver of playing victim when he has no right to do so. It's a matter of degrees.
A bit of a tangential point: last week there was a post here about Facebook "changing the rules" and a significant number of small businesses disappearing as a result. Whether or not Uber's black car reimbursement really did change, it strikes me that drivers probably made business decisions (e.g. car purchases) based on Uber's initial reimbursement and are now seeing the rules change and grossing far fewer profits than expected (and prices still have a ways to go).
One can argue that these small business owners / contractors should have had the foresight not to do business on someone else's platform, but this strikes me as a bit Malthusian. Going through bankruptcy is no small price to pay for this lesson. Hopefully the next Facebook or Uber will have to promise some degree of stability (the same way I am very wary of working with SaaS startups), but I'm not optimistic - there's a fool born every minute.
The problem with this is that it ignores the economic realities that went into the decision of Uber to lower fairs and assumes that their demand would have remained the same with or without doing it. Drivers would have not been happy with higher fairs if they couldn't, well...get a fair because of lowered demand.
How is this video not illegal, especially in California?
And sure rates went down, but it's still 3X the price of UberX. It didn't go down precipitously. From $4.90/1.25 to 3.75/0.65 won't cause someone to lose $97k and probably he got more activity overall. I agree with the CEO that this guy sounds like he's blaming Uber for his problems, when there are plenty of UberBlack drivers making hand over fist otherwise the drivers wouldn't be there. My wife's last UberX driver said he was making $3k/week.
> How is this video not illegal, especially in California?
You agree to surveillance when you enter the car. Just like a taxi, a bus, a train or a trolley.
You actually don't have an "expectation of privacy" in these spaces either. So a drone cam or telephoto lens is okay too. That's where state law is interesting.
California is actually surprisingly permissive for photographers and videographers.
Unless Uber has that in its terms of service, that may be open to interpretation. Even if an Uber is considered a public space, that's not the sole determining factor in two-party consent cases.
"You know what? You know what? Some people don't like to take responsibility for their own shit. They blame every single thing in their life on somebody else". Less than a minute after having blamed the lowering of prices on his competitor(s). That delicious irony.
That's funny Kalanick still thinks he's beaten Lyft. The TNC lot at LAX tells a much different story.
I've been working it for Lyft since December. The lot has about 170 spaces. Lyft and Uber can each queue up 100 vehicles so some would have to park on streets.
Before #deleteuber, I would come in with 90+ drivers ahead of me. I'd have to wait an hour. I would watch Uber drivers arrive after me and leave before me. And the lot was always full while the airport had arriving passenger traffic.
Since #deleteuber, it's much different. LAX seems to be in Prime Time much of the time. But here's the weird thing, the lot is like half empty. There's like 20 cars in the lot that fly only the Uber branding (and plenty flying both logos on their Uber-leased Priuses). I haven't waited more than 10 minutes to get dispatched, except at like 2AM when the passenger air traffic tapers off. On most of my LAX dispatches in the last week, I couldn't even reach a parking space and park before getting dispatched. And this arriving with sometimes as low as 50 drivers ahead of me, and typically 80 or more.
The most incredible time, I arrived at LAX. It was Prime Time in the airport. The app told me the queue was full and to leave. I drove slowly down Jenny Street, the app flipped to 98 ahead of me. I entered the lot, followed the traffic jam of Lyft drivers trying to get to the designated parking area. It took like three minutes. I was dispatched as I entered the parking area. I took the short cut through the fence to exit the lot and picked up my fare.
But here is the clearest indication to me that Lyft completely owns LAX now. I arrived, parked, ran to the porta potty and took a leak. 3 Uber drivers were hanging out near that end of the lot, talking to each other. I got my dispatch while walking to my car. I picked someone up, took them to Marina Del Ray, came back, got dispatched again and those same 3 drivers were still killing time talking to each other.
Lyft is always cheaper out of LAX for some reason. It's always some small amount, like 25-30c on a $45 fare, but quite consistent. My rides to LAX are usually a mishmash of providers, but rides out of LAX, when optimized for price, tend to be exclusively Lyft.
Typical and unfortunate outcome: there is a serious problem with a company's policies. Suddenly everything slightly controversial coming from that company is newsworthy. In doing so, the original well-founded and important criticism is diluted. This is just a more refined form of clickbait.
He probably took out a loan to buy a nice car/limo to do Uber Black work. Since the rates dropped, he probably can't make the monthly payments, let alone maintenance and gas.
He more than likely purchased multiple cars in order to run a business using the Uber infrastructure. He may even have family or friends involved as drivers. If he purchased a luxury car outright, he could also have dropped $97k just for that vehicle alone since Uber Black requires a certain type of vehicle in exchange for higher fare rates.
> Inside of a private car with the windows up isn't public.
If it was your car and someone got in and recorded you, then I'd say that's more clear cut. But if you get into someone else's car do you have a reasonable expectation of privacy?
Since you're technically hiring that person and their car to provide you a service, they have to disclose up-front if you're being recorded. In addition, just because you were being recorded doesn't mean the driver has the right to publicize the video. That requires additional consent unless it's a matter of public record.
I'm not sure about that. This isn't a 'scandal' in the way Uber's treatment of its female engineers is; it's just a driver leaking what was thought to be a private conversation, albeit one that isn't particularly flattering for Travis.
As a passenger, I think I'd be happy to have an example made of a driver who recorded and then published video and audio of a private conversation without consent. I've said and done plenty of things in the back of an Uber/Lyft/taxi that I wouldn't want the whole world to see.
Having issues with Uber's practices is fine, and talking about them publicly is fine—but a driver who makes and leaks illegal recordings is not someone I want to ride with. Throw the book at him, IMO, and frame it as standing up for riders' privacy.
Granted, this is all still speculation, but what would such a lawsuit do to the Uber brand? They'd basically be telling all of their drivers in two-party consent states not to not use dashcams because of the liability, which seems tenuous given some of the terrible videos of riders abusing drivers we've seen. Legal liability over safety seems like a hard sacrifice for people who make so little as it is.
I'm ... fare-ly ... certain certain this law does not apply to recordings for security purposes in a place of business; the vehicle being the place of business of the Uber driver.
EDIT: Er, scratch that. Didn't realize there was audio attached. I think audio might be the incriminating factor in the two party consent thing. I mostly just wanted to make a bad pun.
There are separate laws for video and for audio. Recording video is allowed in most places; audio recording is much more restricted, and as far as I know making this recording was not legal if it was in California. However, litigating it would cause so much more PR damage that it will almost certainly won't be.
Intent matters - as soon as the recording is used (and published!) for a clearly different purpose, the legal situation is quite different. For example disclaimer similar to classic "your call may be recorded for quality control purposes" may allow the recording (depending on the location, etc) but generally will still land you in hot water if the company publishes that for an unrelated reason.
Some states make exceptions for recordings that take place for business security purposes. California does not.
However, CA does make an exception for recording "in any other circumstance in which the parties to the communication may reasonably expect that the communication may be overheard or recorded."
You could certainly make an argument that this douchebag might reasonably expect audio to be recorded in his company's driver's cars. Not so sure you could make that argument for the other passengers.
Interestingly, Bloomberg could be sued (or prosecuted; $5000 fine) for distributing the recording if it indeed falls under CA's wiretapping laws.
This is a terrible jab at Uber. I expected Bloomberg for higher journalistic standard than this.
1. What does "two female friends" have to do with driver's argument with Kalanick? Should've cut that out. I read it as slimy ad hominem to reinforce bias on Uber's culture. Uber might have some culture problem, but it is completely unrelated with driver's issue.
2. Does driver's argument have any basis? The piece merely draws attention to Kalanick and driver's tension - is Bloomberg now a TMZ for business world?
No one seems to be discussing this, but is Travis personally responsible for the loss of the drivers 97k? The driver sure thinks he is. Perhaps he played some roll in it. But the driver certainly made the decision to take out that loan. And I guess the driver had enough sense at the time to understand the risks involved with credit when he took out the loan. Well then you might say it's not the most compassionate thing to say to someone who clearly is suffering from financial loss. But I think it only seems like a mean thing to say because it's true. And it's really these truths that people don't want to accept about themselves. That they themselves are responsible for their own suffering.
I've been reading through these comments and find it quite interesting because both the driver and Kalanick are correct, but as is usual in these confrontations, they weren't communicating properly with each other.
On Kalanick's side, he is entirely correct that Uber has to compete in a very competitive market and most of that competition is in price. If Uber didn't compete on price, they would sign their own death warrant.
On the driver's side, he took a risk in going for an Uber black car and he probably wasn't fully aware of that risk. He seems justified in feeling upset at how exposed he is to market forces that are outside of his control.
Given that, perhaps Uber should better inform drivers of that risk and offer some way that drivers can buffer themselves from that risk. For example, Uber could offer drivers some sort of insurance against rate changes. This would incentivize Uber to be more careful about rate changes since they would pay a penalty if the delta is too big and it would stabilize the rate for drivers -- there are a lot of variables to play with here to make the outcome mutually beneficial.
If DeleteUber succeeds, that's then end of the American dream as we know it.
Starting a tech business with better ideas, and working harder and smarter than the Old Boys with Money (and taxi medallions) is the one of the last ways anyone, like a Zuckerberg, can climb the ladder, without selling out their own hacker spirit as we call it. The fact that the CEO would sit and dish strategy in a frank manner is something I find commendable, and seems to part of this guy's nature.
But if Uber goes down in flames for this petty PR play after burning through billions in VC money to acquire the market share they are rapidly losing, no young founder, heck no man or woman who hasn't trained in corporate lawyer dark arts is going to be allowed to run these innovative startups who need huge amounts of capital to be sunk initially for a long term payout.
Welcome to the world of "cool program! the grownups will take it from here kiddo."
disclosure: I dont like Uber since 2010. I have always felt Uber has used the wrong means to achieve its success, and because of that I dislike Travis. (most of my HN comments about Uber are either neutral or negative). I feel bad for all those drivers who bit the Uber bait and bought expensive cars, with an expensive / sub prime loan. But it is the similar entitled attitude that lead people to hate the cab/taxi drivers/fleets.
With that said, I still think, in this video, the driver was on the wrong side and Travis was not. In fact, Travis starts replying in a fairly equanimous way, and loses it only after the driver starts blaming Travis for everything. If the driver has such a problem with Uber, he should not be driving for it!
I think what the driver is arguing is that Uber changed its business model from black car only to including UberX and UberPool which drove the price of a trip down and less people using black car. I think this is perfectly reasonable, it's just maybe the way Travis responded was not very nice.
Seems like bad reporting: trying to make a mountain out of molehill. It's the opinion of one driver who happened to get his boss on tape, and had a pretty productive discussion wherein the driver pushed and became rude, more so than Travis. The article painted an inaccurate picture of what happened - it's entirely a non-issue imo.
The article says that the Uber customer price went down for Black ($4.90 to $3.75 etc) but does anyone have any evidence that the amount paid to drivers has gone down (given there's a large disconnect between Uber customer prices and what is paid to drivers).
In this day and age of the NSA, let them record it and put it all over the internet. I have a dash cam myself, but not for inside the car, although it does record the audio inside, (which can pick up some outside audio).
Does Travis have the temperament to lead this company to a public offering? Given how much baggage he has and how responsible he is for Uber's current sexist culture, I hope investors give keeping Travis on some thinking. Responsibility for a terrible culture that shields sexist management starts at the top.
Just because someone happens to work for Walmart/Uber/whoever, I don't see why it means that employer suddenly becomes responsible for meeting any particular set of needs that person might have.
You would have been the "awful" kind of slaver back in the day.
Did you really just attack someone the way this comment sounds like you did? That's dismaying. If I've read it correctly, it's the kind of attack we ban accounts for, so please don't do that here.
I thought it was apt. The only problem is that I myself imply that there's a such thing as a "good" slaver, but to assert that an employer is justified by their existence and corporate strategy to reduce their employees to chum is comparably distasteful.
GP's point at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13757973, where they illustrate a few externalized costs, which also seem reasonable to criticize, received pushback that companies don't have to do nothin' for their employees but reap the profits, which is a bad position to take, IMO.
People use the term "un-American" too much these days, but the person I was responding to went way beyond that into anti-civilization.
There is no way that the person I was replying to could possibly be a slaver, so I wasn't attacking them personally. I was connecting their position to that of slavers who would just as soon let their slaves die in the fields from overwork, dehydration, or any number of other things that "shouldn't be the boss' responsibility."
That first paragraph would still be strangely personalized without the first sentence but wouldn't be over the line.
Still, it would be better to make your point about the thing, not the person. We can't really know anything about a person from an internet comment or two, so we mostly see what we project. That tends to make comments unsubstantive in addition to uncivil.
It's funny that you seem to be insinuating that I am using simplistic decision trees instead of analyzing a concrete situation when you were the one who made sweeping arguments about classism and about the rich and the poor.
I did 'use the entirety of my brain power to analyze this situation and think whether something was right or wrong in this given concrete case" and I reached the conclusion that while I am not sure about the legality of it, I'd definitely consider it a dick-ish move.
it's not even categorical! A true categorical distinction requires a formal trigger to make such distinctions, what is the underlying factor that makes one public and the other not besides "the speaker says so"; otherwise it's arbitrary binning, not categorization.
I always ask the drivers how they like Uber, whether they have considered Lyft (most use both), etc.
The only group of highly disgruntled drivers are the ones who lived in the overpriced period of black cars that existed before Uber came into the market.
The driver probably spent $97K on a luxury car expecting to be able to make the prevailing black car driver wage at the time.
Uber did a great service to consumers by democratizing driving services, and now money flows to so many other people and does tremendous benefit to society.
I'm glad Travis stood up for himself. Maybe if that driver had been more rational and less inclined to gripe about other people's successes causing his life to be miserable, he might have started Uber. He likely had a big advantage over Travis in terms of familiarity with the industry and would have made fewer mistakes early on.
1. Uber should really put up a policy against drivers using cockpit cameras to record passengers. Most of them do it without any consent. I usually give them 1 star if someone uses cockpit camera.
2. I have been a big Supporter of Travis Kalanick since last 2-3 years, just for the fact that he's willing to take harsh steps to win. This ultimately helps Uber. Uber's Drivers are not its employees, it doesn't want them to treat them like employees. As more drivers enter the market, supply starts increasing faster than demand and therefore prices must decrease. Since Driving is low barrier profession, its relatively easy to replace them and accumulate them with Uber's model. In this conversation Kalanick is seemingly busy with friends, therefore much less interested in discussing details of his decisions.
> I usually give them 1 star if someone uses cockpit camera.
Why would you do that? These drivers are just "taking harsh steps" to ensure their safety and the safety of their property. I thought you were all for that.
Edit: also why should Uber be allowed to dictate what equipment its "not employees" can and can't use in their own car?
Drivers are contractors, so Uber can dictate the "terms" for contracts it is part of. Drivers are in a contract with Uber.
Uber should be trying to protect its costumers from privacy violations, so it should take steps to ensure drivers are not using anything that would hurt costumers physically or by any other way. I understand the some of the recent privacy issues in Uber have come from its employees and not from drivers, so It should also be trying to get rid of destructive employees as well.
I have been a big Supporter of Travis Kalanick since last 2-3 years, just for the fact that he's willing to take harsh steps to win.
Sir/Madam, I don't really want to be offensive.
And I know that this is a stupid comparison, but I cannot help myself and I need to ask:
Would you apply the same logic to Hitler? He took really harsh steps to win. And it would've ultimately helped Germany. Other people were not German citizens after all (like drivers are not Uber's employees so who the hell cares). Right?
I mean, I understand Travis. He has a billion dollar business now. I totally get that he might decide to say you know what, fuck the drivers, I'm doing this.
There are huge interests for him to make this decision. Maybe (probably) you and I would've done the same.
But I don't understand why would you be a big supported of him? Why would you cheer for someone who is mal intended to win? You have 0 stakes in his winning.
Again, I didn't mean to offend. I genuinely want to understand why would someone with 0 stakes support an ill intended person.
Edit: I'm not necessarily saying Travis is ill intended. But the parent says he supports him only because he is harsh, therefore not caring about any other point.
I'm no fan of Kalanick, but I thought he comported himself reasonably, taking the time to explain things from his perspective. He could have just said: "sorry no time". Instead he shook the driver's hand, tried to explain the logic of his moving down the luxury scale.
The fact that the footage of him with two women wasn't cut out is frankly disgusting and a total invasion of his privacy. He didn't do anything wrong except flirt a bit. How tawdry of Bloomberg to show that material.
What is wrong with newspapers nowadays? It seems the press decides someone's "fair game" and they just engage in the most blatant character assassination.