[aunty_helen]

>Obviously there are some exceptions to this in the comments but generally, in modern countries where the taxi firms aren’t run by literal mafias and killing people, we should condemn Uber’s behaviour.

hehe love it. In the first world, ...

How about this, I want to arrive at an airport, walk out the front, check a number plate and put my suitcases in the boot knowing that if anything happens I'm not going to be risking 10k worth of stuff.

Oh officer, it was a yellow car that said taxi on the side, you think you'll find my stuff?

In Germany, Berlin of all cities, I had my bagage held to ransom by a taxi driver who "forgot" to start the meter and then decided the 250m we drove was worth an extra 10eur on top of the 15eur trip.

So sorry this is more Uber propaganda, but for the ~1000 Uber reciepts I have in my inbox, I've had few and only little problems. And a lot of these are from a city where people do go missing if they get in the wrong taxi.

Do I love Uber? No. They're sometimes shit. Surge pricing, allowing drivers to pick up a trip and then just cancel, 6 minute arrival timers that are actually 10 minutes away, wait fees from the first minute onwards, grumpy covid mask reminder emails even though I'm always wearing a mask, reissuing fees when they adjust the price and holding extra money on my card until it's all cleared.

But touch wood, I've never been in a crash in an Uber, I have in a taxi (single car, solely the drivers fault), even though it's a 20:1 ratio for journeys I've taken.

Edit: 1051 trips according to my inbox

[usr1106]

1051 trips supporting a clearly criminal business. They admit that basically themselves, until they claim to have changed their direction a couple of years ago.

E.g. here in this country drivers got criminal charges, got all their fares confiscated and some ended up in personal bankruptcy. Uber even kept the 20% commission and the leaked documents say they knew they were operating fucking illegally.

[aunty_helen]

Yea I really couldn't care less about that. It's illegal in the country where most of those trips took place, drivers can have their cars confiscated.

But here's the thing, it comes down to "you can't use ride sharing at the airport". Why you may ask? "BECAUSE, you can't use ride sharing at the airport".

If that's the law, fuck the law.

[usr1106]

You should familiarize yourself with the leaked material. Breaking the law fully intentionally happened in many countries and in many aspects, not only against some stupid regulations which car can pick up passengers where. Why did they have kill-switches in their offices? And all the time they systematically made sure that if something happens the drivers will be punished, but their own money is in tax heavens. The whole business model is about exploiting people: I bet > 90% of their drivers don't understand the concept of deprecation. Somewhere else in this thread it was said in Switzerland a full-time Uber driver earns about as much as a traditionally employed taxi-driver. Except that in a traditional employment the employee doesn't pay for the expenses of running the business (including deprecation). It's the same as if a naive business owner does not understand that revenue is not the same thing as profit.

Besides that the whole model is about exploiting people they implemented it in so many shady and criminal ways. They claim no longer doing the latter after the management changes.

Some people think buying clothes from sweatshops in Bangladesh is fine. Others think exploiting local drivers is fine. Or they just deny to learn the facts. I am not one of them.

[aunty_helen]

> The whole business model is about exploiting people

Which is why people stopped voluntarily working for uber and the company has gone out of business.

> Or they just deny to learn the facts. I am not one of them.

So if ignorance isn't an excuse, tell me about the slave / child workers that mined and assembled the materials for the device you're using to come off as a giant hypocrite right now.

In the city I took most of those rides, people get cut up and dumped in drains for the price of an iphone because they took the wrong taxi late on a Friday night. I'll take kill switches in an office over that, but thanks for your selective concern.

[usr1106]

I am aware of blood mineral problem. I am typing this in Europe on a low end smartphone produced for the Indian market around 2015. While my footprint is not zero, it should be a much lower than regularly updating to the next high end device.

[mccorrinall]

If you’re in germany, use the mytaxi (freenow) app and pay in the app.

https://apps.apple.com/de/app/free-now/id357852748?l=en

[aunty_helen]

Dear Daniel,

Thank you very much for your message.

The driver is registered at the responsible office and will be blocked in this case. Unfortunately we can't do anything about the price, because we are only a mediator and have no influence on price.

Best regards from Hamburg

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