GatewayRedbirds.com

Uber’s use of Greyball was recorded on video in late 2014, when Erich England, a code enforcement inspector in Portland, Ore., tried to hail an Uber car downtown as part of a sting operation against the company.

At the time, Uber had just started its ride-hailing service in Portland without seeking permission from the city, which later declared the service illegal. To build a case against the company, officers like Mr. England posed as riders, opening the Uber app to hail a car and watching as the miniature vehicles on the screen made their way toward the potential fares.

But unknown to Mr. England and other authorities, some of the digital cars they saw in the app did not represent actual vehicles. And the Uber drivers they were able to hail also quickly canceled. That was because Uber had tagged Mr. England and his colleagues — essentially Greyballing them as city officials — based on data collected from the app and in other ways. The company then served up a fake version of the app populated with ghost cars, to evade capture.

The pair discussed the state of the ride-hail market for a few moments before Kamel drove his point home. “People are not trusting you any more,” he said. “I lost $97,000 because of you. I’m bankrupt because of you ... You keep changing every day.”

Kalanick denied that the prices for Uber’s high-end service, Uber Black, have fallen that much, saying, “[expletive].”

Then he got personal with Kamel.

“Some people don’t like to take responsibility for their own [expletive],” he said. “They blame everything in their life on somebody else. Good luck!” Then he slammed the door.

Uber recently came under fire for allegedly failing to address sexual-harassment and gender discrimination complaints made by a female then-employee against a male supervisor with a history of unprofessional behavior. In the days that followed, two other female former Uber employees wrote their own stories of harassment and mistreatment, which, taken together, add up to an image of a toxic work environment that makes it difficult for women to work with dignity, much less get ahead.

But there are at least a few female Uber employees who seem happy as can be at the company: the fake ones invented by male managers to get drivers to stay on the job.

This is one of the weirder tidbits unearthed in the New York Times’ recent article on the mind games Uber plays with its drivers and the app modifications it makes to try to encourage them to work longer hours at busier times. Replete with 8 bit­–style interactives, the piece explains that gamifying Uber-driving with arbitrary goals and badges has kept more drivers on the road when they would have normally signed off.

And, it turns out, drivers are more likely to obey a female manager who nudges them than a male one. When Uber started urging its local managers to text, email, and send notifications to area drivers about logging in at a particularly busy time or driving to a particularly busy neighborhood, some managers decided to don virtual drag. The Times offers the case of John P. Parker, who managed Dallas Uber drivers in 2014 and 2015 under the name Laura. “‘Laura’ would tell drivers: ‘Hey, the concert’s about to let out. You should head over there,’” Parker said. He noted that the Dallas area had an “overwhelmingly male” roster of drivers, implying that men wanted to please or impress managers who were women but were more likely to ignore the encouraging pleas of managers who were men.

Famous Mortimer wrote:But seriously though, they are scum