Hi, we’re a tech startup run by libertarian Silicon Valley tech bros.
We’re not a newspaper, we’re a content portal.
We’re not a taxi service, we’re a ride sharing app.
We’re not a pay TV service, we’re a streaming platform.
We’re not a department store, we’re an e-commerce marketplace.
We’re not a financial services firm, we’re crypto.
We’re not a space agency, we’re a group of visionaries who are totally going to Mars next year.
We’re not a copywriting and graphic design agency, we’re a large language model generative AI platform.
Oh sure, we compete against those established businesses. We basically provide the same goods and services.
But we’re totally not those things. At least from a legal and PR standpoint.
And that means all the laws and regulations that have built up over the decades around those industries don’t apply to us.
Things like consumer protections, privacy protections, minimum wage laws, local content requirements, safety regulations, environmental protections… They totally don’t apply to us.
Even copyright laws — as long as we’re talking about everyone else’s intellectual property.
We’re going to move fast and break things — and then externalise the costs of the things we break.
We’ve also raised several billion in VC funding, and we’ll sell our products below cost — even give them away for free for a time — until we run our competition out of the market.
Once we have a near monopoly, we’ll enshitify the hell out of our service and jack up prices.
You won’t believe what you agreed to in our terms of service agreement.
We may also be secretly hoarding your personal information. We know who you are, we know where you work, we know where you live. But you can trust us.
By the time the regulators and the general public catch on to what we’re doing, we will have well and truly moved on to our next grift.
By the way, don’t forget to check out our latest innovation. It’s the Uber of toothpaste!
@ajsadauskas @technology The one thing I don’t sympathise with in that list is the taxi services — at least here in Ottawa, they were even more exploitative than Uber or Lyft, with a small number of plate holders acting as feudal lords for the drivers, and extracting rent from their vassals even on a bad shift with few fares.
The city could have fixed that by issuing more plates, but the plate-owner lobby was too powerful.
#Taxis #Uber #Lyft #Ottawa
Yes ‘medallion systems’ have huge problems. One reason they were implemented to begin with was that an unlimited fleet put everyone out of business. Uber is reintroducing that problem.
@markr Very true. Ideally, the city would have managed taxi plates (medallions), increasing the supply every year so that it approximately matched the number of drivers the market would support, instead of freezing it at an artificially-low level so that plates were selling for $500K+ on the secondary market (before Uber and Lyft wiped out their value).
#Ottawa #taxis
Isn’t that just supply and demand?
I think the issue was there was artificially very little supply allowed, so not a free market.
Yes, it is in fact a classic example of market failure, which of course can’t exist in liberloon world.
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@Eka_FOOF_A @david_megginson @ajsadauskas @technology The taxi business needed disruption. But the cure has been worse than the disease.
Not sure if I agree there. Even with all the problems they have, ride-sharing apps are still way more convenient than how taxis used to work.
@socsa @SVChucko This isn’t personal experience, but women have told me they feel far safer in Uber or Lyft than they used to in hailed taxis. One younger woman told me she didn’t know of a single female friend in Toronto who hadn’t been harassed or assaulted in taxis.
It can happen in an Uber or Lyft, too, but it’s much rarer because there’s always traceability and consequencies for the driver.