[lhorie]

> you helped destroy an established industry

The latest news on this is literally the opposite (Uber integrating w/ various taxi companies as their lead generation and dispatch provider)

FWIW, I've talked with a number of drivers over the years, and there's people using Uber as a flex source of income while some other pursuit hasn't gotten off the ground yet, people using it to supplement FTE income from elsewhere, people that made bank post pandemic, people doing it to be active in retirement, people who complain about platform issues, people that give it praise, and everything in between. I think if one is going to be outraged on behalf of drivers, it behooves them to try to understand how diverse the driver population is in the first place.

On a similar note, I think people often get hung up on some pet notion but fail to realize there's a lot of stuff going on that makes it hard to keep tally in an ethical bean counter. For example, there's efforts to support Ukraine[0], there's one about increasing women's workforce participation via government-subsided commutes in the middle east, there's the electric vehicle incentives, etc.

Do these offset some ideological notion of how the transportation industry ought to work? I don't know, but I think only looking at the ideology side isn't going to tell the whole story of what's happening on the ground.

[0] https://www.uber.com/newsroom/support-for-ukraine-2022/

[Eisenstein]

To be clear, I am not fond of the taxi industry. My point was that destroying things and replacing them with a subsidized temporary solution with no plan for what to do when the money runs out is irresponsible and the people who run these companies clearly don't care.

[lhorie]

I mean, the latest earnings guidance was saying Uber was expecting to be GAAP profitable on an operating basis by the end of year (it already was profitable on an EBITDA basis for a while, and it was technically GAAP profitable on an overall basis in Q1 due to some equity appreciation). It's currently rolling out ads, which is known in the tech industry to be a high margin source of revenue, and if you google Uber in the news these days you'll see a plethora of other things coming to fruition that would simply never have happened under the taxi oligarchy.

I think latching on to the talking points from 8 years ago is not doing enough justice to how much Uber changed since then.

[Eisenstein]

> I think latching on to the talking points from 8 years ago is not doing enough justice to how much Uber changed since then.

I am specifically talking a person about their experience working there at that time. This conversation is not about if Uber has changed or how bad the taxi industry was, this conversation is about 'can you be a good person while working for a corporation which is recklessly disregarding important social structures in order to maximize profit without concern for consequences'.

EDIT: I realize now I should have more clear with my tenses.

[lhorie]

> not about if Uber has changed

Shouldn't it be though? Even without getting into the weeds of Machiavellian ethics, I think if one can argue "you helped a high momentum company do X bad thing", then it's fair game to argue "you helped a high momentum company reach Y good outcome" as well. I don't mean to shit on the taxi industry when I bring them up, I mean that there are positive things Uber does today that are only feasible due to the sheer scale it achieved through the means it took to get there, and because even through its darkest periods, there were many insiders that sincerely wanted to do the right thing (and who eventually prevailed).

Is it "bad" if bad things happen from shaking things up and then good things materialize after that? As I said, I don't know to what extent the goods outweigh the bads or don't, but I'm trying to form strong opinions held weakly.

[Eisenstein]

Let's try a thought experiment:

I get a bit drunk at a friend's house and my friend realizes I shouldn't drive home so he offers to let me sleep on in the guest room until I sober up. I refuse and get behind the wheel and make my way home. On the way I see a flipped car in a body of water near the road. I stop and jump in and save the trapped person.

Did the morally good act of saving a person negate the morally reprehensible act of driving drunk?

The end results don't make your actions in the original instance OK, even if the bad case (wrecking and killing someone) didn't happen but instead a good one did. I shouldn't have been driving since it objectively at the time was immoral and I had no way of knowing what would happen.

[lhorie]

I think your thought experiment differs from the original topic in few different ways.

For one, the person you were replying to isn't the CEO. A more accurate analogy might be drawing ethical conclusions about the accountant in the company that built the road that led to the accident (or one at the beer company or a weapons company if we want to be spicier)

And the other thing is your drunk driver analogy has a big serendipity aspect to it. The change of tune at Uber was very deliberate in response to the reputational damage its earlier iteration inflicted on itself. A more useful thought experiment might be one about an ex-con gangster turned community service volunteer.

I agree reprehensible occasions remain reprehensible no matter what, what I don't agree with is the notion of immutable morality (X person is always as moral as they were previously), ascribing morality of amorphous groups to individuals, and various other cognitive biases I see people committing in threads like this.