This does feel a bit weird - short-term rental of petting animals? I'm worried about mishandling, animal cruelty and the whole concept - pets form an attachment with you, doing it as a short-term rental isn't an acceptable way of building a relationship...
One of the big things they stressed, at least for the dogs, was how important it was to play with the them. Expose them to people, scratch their ears through the grate on their kennel, pay attention to them, etc. etc.
The reasoning being that dogs who are used to humans, and are affectionate towards them, are more likely to get adopted.
If this was for dogs, it would be a HUGE benefit to them. Getting them out around people is almost always a good thing for them.
Cats are nothing like dogs though. While it's also important to socialize kittens as soon as possible to make them comfortable around humans, I don't think it's a good idea to haul them around town in a car. Cats don't like to be taken outside their known environment at all, and they don't like to be locked inside a box, or transported in a noisy car.
Just to give some perspective, my own cat loves people, strange or familiar, it doesn't matter at all. Take her to the vet in a car though, and she will go mental, crap and pee in the cat carrier, meow and hiss when she gets let outside of it (never does that otherwise) and be extremely edgy for sometimes 2 days afterwards. I wouldn't go as far as saying this is 'cruel' to the kittens, and it's great that the proceedings are donated to an animal shelter, but I'm pretty sure the kittens will not enjoy it nearly as much as the people who get to cuddle with them.
Might kittens be different from cats in this regard? I don't really have experience with either, but I imagine kittens may be more tolerating of environment changes.
It really depends on the kitten. If you are ever in the market for one, a visit to your nearest cat/kitten rescue centre will illustrate just how much of a unique personality each kitten has. Some sit on your lap and purr almost instantaneously, some are very nervous, some are playful, some mischievous, some seem to love kids, some don't etc etc.
I think it does depend on the cat, though. I've had several cats that are just fine being in a carrier and like sniffing the air and looking around outside when they're in one (they don't get outside normally get more outside than looking out the window here in NYC).
You can train cats to like this too. I knew a guy who would take his cat out for walks like a dog. It loved the attention and seemed quite happy wandering around looking at new things.
The bog standard way of getting animal adoptions is to take a bunch of kittens/puppies to a public place, and let people hold/play with them. And it works, because generally, puppies and kittens like socialization, and people are more likely to adopt an animal if they see one.
Though, normally it's free, and the animals aren't delivered by a taxi service.
> I'm worried about mishandling, animal cruelty...
From the article "You will have a chance to adopt the Kittens! YES, IT’S TRUE! For more information, please chat with the shelter representative that will be assisting with kitten wrangling!"
All kittens come with a shelter representative who will presumably keep an eye on you and the kitten.
There is actually a lot of value in this in that it helps the animal socialize. Animals with a lot of human contact and contact with other animals (assuming all such contact is positive) form fairly pleasant dispositions. Those animals which "don't play well with others" generally grew up with a lot less human contact and/or contact with other animals, or that had negative experiences with other humans and animals.
I've seen volunteers walk shelter pets down the street and take them to the park, where dozens of strangers (hopefully!) stop to pet and play with them for a few minutes.
Sounds harmless to me as long as the animals have long-term support too.
The welfare of animals isn't really a minute problem. It's ok to want more info on how the cats are selected and treated for what is ultimately a publicity stunt.
If I said the welfare of animals was a minute problem, you'd have a point. But it's kittens being pet by people that's a minute problem. Shelters bring them around to a variety of places, like the Palo Alto farmers market, already. This is just an extension of that advertising mechanism. And it is an infinitesimally small problem.
My college had the local shelter bring dogs to the library during finals week for stress relief. It was wonderful, and the lady from the shelter said the dogs loved it.
I had this idea a few years ago. Before my wife and I moved to a place that allowed animals, I used to wish there was a way I could rent a dog while at the beach.
The shelter I used to volunteer at had a program where you could take the dogs off site for the day -- it was the best thing ever for the dog as it got a day out in the world as opposed to in a kennel.
It never ceased to amaze me how quickly they would get adopted after an off-site day; seemed to just hit a reset button on their stress levels.
Pretty much. I went to one of those places in Tokyo, years ago, where you pay to pet cats and it was a depressing place. There were cats who were into it, but there were cats who clearly didn't want to be there (and some who'd been confined to cages that looked like little human apartments and were pacing constantly inside them).
I've been to a cat cafe in Tokyo, and I don't remember seeing any cats in cages. I do agree that it was a depressing place though, none of the cats were interested in interacting with the humans.
The place still seemed popular. I don't know why. The one stray cat I found during my stay in Tokyo was much more friendly than any of the cats in the cafe.
I know it's fun, but I honestly think they're testing the waters with this sort of thing - same goes with the "Call an Ice Cream Truck" campaign from this summer.
Uber has repeatedly done specials, e.g. delivering a mariachi band last year. I really don't think any of this is meant as a permanent product, but more as a PR strategy. And in this case they can also claim to do it for a good cause.
Yes, Uber has said in their interviews (or maybe it was pg talking about them?) that once they have the infrastructure set up to deliver a car anywhere they can branch out into on demand delivery of anything.
(A disclaimer: I work for Flywheel -- we're an Uber competitor. Take anything I say about Uber with a grain of salt.)
I'm not sure how much synergy there actually is between "get a taxi on demand" and "deliver goods on demand." I mean, taxis have existed forever. Presumably, if someone thought it was cost effective, they could have used taxis as a logistics network long ago. But taxis are really, really, really expensive (and Uber black cars are yet more expensive) in terms of what people expect to pay for shipping. UPS or the postal service will ship a small package across the country for me for $10 or less. A taxi in SF won't go a mile for $10.
Is there some reason to believe that Uber changes the game with regard to all that? They aren't drastically lowering the price of taxis. Their success has been in raising the service level of taxi-like-services, and in reducing the inconvenience of getting a taxi dispatched to you. I don't say this to take anything away from Uber -- I think they have a fantastic service -- but I don't see their successes as being things that really have a lot to do with what you want from a goods distribution network. If what you want to do is have a very expensive courier service for some kind of physical good, do you really mind calling dispatch and talking to a person?
Uber could know with 100% confidence based on past data that a driver passes by a certain address almost daily. For him to deliver a courier to that address would be significantly less work to driving a few miles only to deliver the coirier(the assumption in your argument).
I still don't know if the financials make sense in my particular example but it does tell you the optimizations Uber can make based on the historical data.
Well, but no. They can't know with "100% confidence" where a driver will drive in any given day. They probably can't even know with 90% confidence. Taxi drivers don't drive regular routes, they drive where a diverse set of passengers need to go. There are probably a few destinations that a lot of drivers hit almost every shift (most notably the airport), but arbitrary business or residential address 1 to arbitrary business or residential address 2? Probably not.
And if they were to offer some kind of "by the way" service where you say, "I want to get this package across town, you send somebody who will eventually deliver it to my destination because my destination is near a major taxi destination," do people actually want that service? I was under the impression that in-town point-to-point couriering was typically done because you have a tight deadline for when the package needs to arrive -- after all, if it's just a few miles away, and you aren't on a tight schedule, you could just mail it and it would probably arrive the next business day. This doesn't sound like a big business opportunity to me.
Delivery of large quantities of goods on a same-day timeframe, like Amazon wants to do, that's a big business opportunity. But I don't see how Uber's business or Uber's dataset solves that problem.
I believe that Google's driverless cars have a bigger financial gain by delivering goods rather than people. We all think they're doing the automated taxi thing, but I think that's just to make the general public comfortable with driverless cars being on the roads.
It's a dessert topping! It's a floor wax! It's both!
Either a car is safe to drive on regular streets without human supervision or it isn't. It doesn't matter what's inside.
You could probably imagine a scenario in which the cost of the self-driving kit (not the software, but things like "a LIDAR array") was something like $100,000. In which case maybe most private individuals are priced out of the market, but some corporations are like, "This is still cheaper than paying for drivers." But I don't really see why that wouldn't apply to taxis as well as kitten-delivery. And in any case, it's hard to imagine why the cost of an automation kit would not drop in time.
So I don't think there are too many plausible scenarios in which it is persistently the case that automated cars only carry non-human cargo.
This seems incredibly underpriced. Make it $50 and target office parties, add another $50-100 for catered cupcakes and they'd make a ton of money for shelters.
-It's a great PR gimmick for Uber/CheezBurger and it's something others can learn from.
-Uber articles typically end up on HN because of their presence in SF and that a lot of HN users use Uber (all of the 50~ people that I personally know on HN have used Uber) or are otherwise connected to people who work at Uber.
-Ben Huh is awesome. He's a great advisor and him being involved means I'm going to upvote it.
-Kittens on demand = cool.
-Kittens, cupcakes, and raising money for a good cause = Awesome.
>> No cash required! Donations will be charged directly to your Uber account.
This is big as most everyone who signs up now has an account with Uber. Once Uber has my credit card information, I am less hesitant to use their service in the future. It sounds like a great way to reduce friction to me.
Off-topic: I remember when the only reason I signed up for Living Social was because Amazon.com was giving me $10 in gift certificate. I thought they were idiots for giving me free money. Of course, I don't think twice about having a $90 gift card balance "because it never expires".
Uber is the poster child of Bay area 'p2p capitalist' startups covered on HN and if anyone was in any doubt about there being a second bubble this effortlessly invites the pets.com comparison
This is a reputable company offering the service, not some sketchy back-of-the-alley vendor. It could be a wonderful service for people that cannot keep pets in their rental apartments for instance, or people that live with someone allergic to cat fur preventing them from owning a cat, or plain and simple people with really busy lives that wished they could own a pet but know they'd be unable to care for it properly.
Personally I've wanted countless times to keep a cat for the long-term, it simply wasn't possible because I knew I'd end up neglecting it, especially considering that kittens require so much attention.
What's the harm in this? Instead of sitting in a shelter all day long, the animals are socialized well, they get to experience varied new environments and maybe even end up being adopted by the customer.
Have you considered that this could also be great for old, retired and lonely persons, like someone's grandma that lives all by herself and barely gets any visitors?
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