alt Hacker NewsI will say before Uber was a thing, if I tried to call and schedule a taxi pickup in the city I lived in at the time, if they showed up at all they were at east a half hour late. Missed a flight because of it once. I don’t even like uber, but it is objectively a better service most of the time.
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Counterpoint: I scheduled an Uber once to take me to the airport. They arrived earlier than the requested time and left when I met them at the time I requested because they waited too long. This was on Uber Black, their professional driver level service.
Counterpoint: It is increasingly impossible to get to a human at Uber when you need support, as most of their support channels are gated by LLMs and self-service support workflows.
Yes, Uber did something enormously creative. But it also did something destructive and we're guilty of an accounting sleight of hand if we focus on one while pretending the other doesn't exist.
We still want to encourage creative destruction to move forward, but paying taxes to clean up the destruction is the very least that the victorious parties can do because the entanglement exists in moral accounting even if it doesn't exist in financial accounting.
Uber also forced taxi services to have apps and always accept CCs.
Yeah, anyone who uses taxi drivers as an example of destruction either don't know what they're talking about (because they never experienced it) or they're crying crocodile tears.
I had cab drivers nearly drive off with me hanging off the car in San Francisco, because they were far more concerned with screening my destination than, say, not killing me. If Uber destroyed that industry, it was only a net benefit to society. They created immense value, and the "destruction" was only to eliminate a layer of corrupt parasites who made money by preventing a free market (in this case, the medallion owners, but the entire industry was corrupt from top to bottom).