Uber

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pioneer98
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Re: Uber

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Uber to Repay Millions to Drivers, Who Could Be Owed Far More
Uber said Tuesday that it had made a mistake in the way it calculated its commissions, at a cost of tens of millions of dollars to its New York drivers, and the company vowed to correct the practice and make the drivers whole for the lost earnings.

The ride-hailing service said it had been taking its cut from a figure including state taxes, rather than a pretax fare. If a passenger handed over $20, and $2 of that represented taxes, Uber’s commission was a percentage of the full $20, not of $18, as it should have been. Even at pocket change per ride, the cumulative difference was vast.
But Uber’s handling of passenger payments raises questions about a larger legal issue, potentially far more substantial: not the pocket-change difference in the commission but whether that entire $2 in taxes is improperly coming out of the drivers’ wallets.

Uber’s contract with drivers appears to allow the company to deduct only its 25 percent commission, not taxes, from their fares. But a lawsuit filed by a drivers’ advocacy group in New York last year said the company was making its drivers swallow the tax burden — a practice the group said amounted to wage theft.

Documents examined by The New York Times also point to such a practice, which could have cost drivers hundreds of millions of dollars.

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pioneer98
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Re: Uber

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http://nymag.com/selectall/2017/05/insi ... anick.html
Last summer, after a man died in a Tesla that was using the car’s Autopilot system, which allows for autonomous driving on highways, Levandowski told several Uber engineers that they were not pushing aggressively enough. “I’m pissed we didn’t have the first death,” Levandowski said, according to a person familiar with the conversation. (Levandowski denies saying this.)

tlombard
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Re: Uber

Post by tlombard »

With everything else the executives of Uber have said and done... he said it. They get no benefit of the doubt from me.

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pioneer98
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Re: Uber

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Uber Co-Founder Travis Kalanick Resigns Under Pressure As CEO

All that had to happen for him to resign was:
- Lose billions of dollars for years
- Have 500K people delete their app in like a week back in January
- Have a massive company-wide sexual harassment scandal
- Have to pay drivers millions for back-wages since they were under-paid for several years
- Use secret software to try to fool municipal regulators
- Have male managers pose as female managers because drivers were likely to work longer hours
- Secretly track the movements of app users, and only stop when Apple threatened to crack down
- Be accused of stealing Google's self-driving car technology
- Have company parties in Vegas with cocaine and Beyonce

Otherwise he ran a tight ship.

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Joe Shlabotnik
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Re: Uber

Post by Joe Shlabotnik »

Uber pays hackers 100k to destroy evidence of a hack affecting 57 million customers. Hid it for a year.

I've hated this amoral company since the start. The fact that people allowed it to thrive instead of die gives you all the clues you need to understand the Trump phenomena. Nothing matters. It really doesnt.

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Schlich
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Re: Uber

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Joe Shlabotnik wrote:Uber pays hackers 100k to destroy evidence of a hack affecting 57 million customers. Hid it for a year.

I've hated this amoral company since the start. The fact that people allowed it to thrive instead of die gives you all the clues you need to understand the Trump phenomena. Nothing matters. It really doesnt.
assuming by 'people' you mean its consumers...

it would help if we had better public transporation. Hate to be all "there's no ethical consumerism under late capitalism" but there's no ethical consumerism under late capitalism. Can't fault working class people for not wanting to use overpriced and unreliable taxis.

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BottenFieldofDreams
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Re: Uber

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Schlich wrote:
Joe Shlabotnik wrote:Uber pays hackers 100k to destroy evidence of a hack affecting 57 million customers. Hid it for a year.

I've hated this amoral company since the start. The fact that people allowed it to thrive instead of die gives you all the clues you need to understand the Trump phenomena. Nothing matters. It really doesnt.
assuming by 'people' you mean its consumers...

it would help if we had better public transporation. Hate to be all "there's no ethical consumerism under late capitalism" but there's no ethical consumerism under late capitalism. Can't fault working class people for not wanting to use overpriced and unreliable taxis.
Consumers and investors. Even at their municipality-bullying, Carnegie Mellon-raiding worst, Uber had blocks-long lines of people waving very large notes at them. And that wasn't all based on the present market. Being one of the handful of men who draws the windfall from all those robot cars driving everyone from point a to point b would be a pretty good position.

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Schlich
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Re: Uber

Post by Schlich »

BottenFieldofDreams wrote:
Schlich wrote:
Joe Shlabotnik wrote:Uber pays hackers 100k to destroy evidence of a hack affecting 57 million customers. Hid it for a year.

I've hated this amoral company since the start. The fact that people allowed it to thrive instead of die gives you all the clues you need to understand the Trump phenomena. Nothing matters. It really doesnt.
assuming by 'people' you mean its consumers...

it would help if we had better public transporation. Hate to be all "there's no ethical consumerism under late capitalism" but there's no ethical consumerism under late capitalism. Can't fault working class people for not wanting to use overpriced and unreliable taxis.
Consumers and investors. Even at their municipality-bullying, Carnegie Mellon-raiding worst, Uber had blocks-long lines of people waving very large notes at them. And that wasn't all based on the present market. Being one of the handful of men who draws the windfall from all those robot cars driving everyone from point a to point b would be a pretty good position.
yes, solid points.

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BottenFieldofDreams
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Re: Uber

Post by BottenFieldofDreams »

I do hear from drivers that Lyft treats them better. But ultimately, like Uber, Lyft's play is to not have to treat them in any way whatsoever. Maybe they lack some of the baggage, and they certainly have some moral high ground--hell society would be better if we could all just hop in a robot car, I mean, if we could make it happen without casualties--but it's easy to envision a bleak jobless future with some scary-powerful people.

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Re: Uber

Post by tlombard »

Joe Shlabotnik wrote:Uber pays hackers 100k to destroy evidence of a hack affecting 57 million customers. Hid it for a year.

I've hated this amoral company since the start. The fact that people allowed it to thrive instead of die gives you all the clues you need to understand the Trump phenomena. Nothing matters. It really doesnt.
I still hate the company but I'm pretty much full Uber now when I am not driving or taking public transportation somewhere. I held out as long as I could but with everybody else switching to Uber, the wait for cabs started getting longer and longer because cab drivers defected to Uber. When it's time to go home from the bar, it's time to go home and waiting on cabs just wasn't working anymore.

I might give Lyft a shot this weekend. I've been meaning to.

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