Uber faces criminal probe over Greyball s/w used to evade regulation
Razer
g2s at riseup.net
Sat May 6 19:26:58 PDT 2017
On 05/06/2017 06:21 PM, Shawn K. Quinn wrote:
> On 05/06/2017 08:11 PM, Razer wrote:
>> It gave spotters for regulators in Portland 'false screens', essentially
>> blackballing the uber user.
>>
>> http://www.reuters.com/article/us-uber-tech-crime-exclusive-idUSKBN1802U1
>>
>>
>> In other news Uber's billionaire owners are running beg ads in the app
>> for users to donate to a medical insurance fund for drivers (b/c they
>> don't think it's their job... Like WalMart).
> Is Lyft any better? Is zTrip any better? If not, what should we use instead?
>
A taxi? You can call them. Most will deliver a car at an appointed time
if you want. (I used to go grocery shopping for less-than-ambulatory
senior citizens with the meter running regularly and pick up whiskey for
housebound drunks) If you use the same company often most DO allow
"Personals"... driver of your choice, if available.
Don't know about ztrip, but here's a good writeup on Lyft, and the whole
"Sharing" biz in general by Marxist sociologist Darwin Bond-Graham
Sharing Rides, Hoarding Profits
How the SF Bay area's technology elite are destroying poor & people of
color's incomes by 'Disruptive Innovation'
The winners and losers in many cases of disruption are split
along existing racial and class lines of inequality. Those with
little economic or political power to defend themselves from the
disruptors are seeing their livelihoods and communities turned
upside down. Their small businesses are being destroyed. Their
communities are becoming unaffordable… …
“Disruption” is the zeitgeist of Silicon Valley’s tech industry,
especially in the realm of startups. The mythos goes like this:
small scrappy hackers with very little capital and a few computers
can create new business models that will topple older fossilized
companies, even whole industries. In the process the economy will
become more efficient and everyone will have more choices. We all
win thanks to the new Internet-enabled economy. That’s not at all
what is happening in reality, however.
The ideology of disruption goes back a long way in the annals
theorizing capitalism, but the current ideology really owes more to
Clayton Christensen, a Harvard Business School professor and devout
Mormon who has built his academic career on case studies of
disruptors. Christensen’s seminal 1998 article in the Harvard
Business Review on disruption tells a story about dominant companies
atop their industries —Firestone, Xerox, IBM— that were caught flat
footed, and in several cases destroyed, by their smaller creative
competitors. They failed to innovate and grow beyond their core
markets. They failed to recognize the potential of a new technology
that would make their existing products and services obsolete. This
has fidelity with the actual history of American business.
Christensen, along with his son Matthew, manages a hedge fund
that purports to bet on disruptors and short the stock of bumbling
giants. Christensen also sponsors a think tank he named after
himself, the Christensen Institute, which, according to its web site
is, “dedicated to improving the world through disruptive innovation.”
California’s tech entrepreneurs have embraced Christensenian
disruption. The big case studies in tech that seem to confirm
Christensen’s theory are well known. Digital cameras destroyed film.
Personal computers displaced mainframes as the core hardware
business, and laptops have since eaten into a huge share of the
personal computer market. Now mobile devices are eroding PC sales.
None was ever seen as a threat to the existing dominant product and
producer, but displacement happened nonetheless. Tapes replaced
vinyl, CDs replaced tapes, but MP3s and iTunes-like services have
replaced CDs. Cloud is displacing both the idea of storing your data
on physical drives you own. Software as a service is chipping away
at the idea of buying and owning software. And so on…
In a lot of cases disruption ends up being a battle of big
corporations for market share. Consumers and employees within the
industry aren’t necessarily better or worse off when the smoke
clears and a winner emerges with a new technology and business model.
But the tech boom today is characterized by a another kind of
disruption. It’s social disruption. New technologies and business
models don’t just attack the existing dominant corporations; they
attack social relations and transform non-business spheres of life
into methodical instances of economic exchange from which the new
tech innovators extract revenue. The tech boom is also characterized
by disruption of smaller competitive markets by emergent tech
monopolists backed ultimately by huge pools of private equity and
giant, monopoly-seeking corporations.
The winners and losers in many cases of disruption are split
along existing racial and class lines of inequality. Those with
little economic or political power to defend themselves from the
disruptors are seeing their livelihoods and communities turned
upside down. Their small businesses are being destroyed. Their
communities are becoming unaffordable. Those with cultural capital,
and access to economic capital have a shot at being disruptive, at
skimming some wealth off of deregulated industry and precarious
labor. And the wealthy individuals and companies that should be
disrupted by a clever tech startup —the tax dodging banks, the
Fortune 500, the health care companies and insurance giants— have
the resources to defend themselves, fend off the geeks, deploy an
equally clever response to retain market share, or to just buyout
the scrappy competitor and fold it into their existing empire.
The ridesharing phenomenon reflects all of this and more.
Ridesharing companies like Lyft, Uber, and Sidecar use the
ubiquitous ownership of smartphones to connect casual drivers and
passenger clients through their proprietary applications. Like any
broker they take...
More: http://www.counterpunch.org/2013/10/18/sharing-rides-hording-profits/
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