Morning Ed: Transportation {2017.03.01.W}
How German carmakers plan to navigate the future of transportation.
The thing is, it wasn’t really the bug that caused the divorce… (though I’m not sure if they see it that way in France).
Purvi Rajani tells the story of cruise ships and pirates.
How did this happen somewhere other than in Florida?
Just when you think you’ve got a retrograde outrage, it gets a bit more complicated.
A look at Google’s lawsuit against Uber in the smart car battles. It involves lasers! Either way, Ryan Felton says Uber is doomed. If so, that doesn’t bode well for the future of Flying Cars.
I can appreciate the method of protest, but if the purpose is obscured, it strikes me as outrage for its own sake, which isn’t very useful.Report
I think the point is not the protest, but the “I had to pull my car off the road and experience a violent physical reaction” thing.
Because, um, that doesn’t sound healthy.Report
It sounds extremely virtuous. How are we going to know how good a person she is if she doesn’t have an over-the-top reaction?Report
Uber screwed up by poaching the Google engineer & going straight to a parallel project. They might prevail in the lawsuit, but the legal costs & PR hit is going to hurt.Report
Oscar,
Uber is a bit like Trump — good at playing the villain. Their sexual harassment issues are self-inflicted, and hurt PR way more than poaching google employees.Report
The hiring itself was probably legal. The copying of the entire petabyte of source code and data from Google was not. It might be that the hires also disclosed trade secrets.
The thing about Kalanick is that before Uber, he ran two different file sharing companies. The first one went bankrupt when sued by the RIAA. He currently runs a company that could be described as an illegal taxi service. He’s kind of a Darth Vader wannabe, so I will call him a Kylo Ren.
Google was an investor in Uber, and until last Friday owned a big chunk of them. They are pulling all that investment, and the prospective value of that investment is included in damages, as well as the prospective value of, you know, robot cars. Should Google prevail, Uber is dead.
I’m a bit sad, though, because there’s a thing there in the Uber-Lyft space that seems worthwhile. I’ve kinda been screwed over by taxi companies, as I’ve mentioned before in this space.Report
I agree that poaching the engineer wasn’t illegal, but the data dump certainly violates an employment contract at the very least, and exposes Uber to trade secret violations. My point about the lidar system is that, if nothing else, it was a big flare to Google that their former employee was sharing data.
As for Kalanick, he’s not having a good year.Report
Also, the price paid for a company with no product or working prototype that is less than a year old, that you had contact with while still employed at Google indicates to me that Uber was, at best, only technically ignorant about the source of the information because they did zero due diligence on the source (because they already knew but wanted plausible deniability in the most technical sense).Report
A lot of dumping on Uber in that article, but the main thing that stood out to me was: “rider fares only cover roughly 40 percent of a ride, with the remainder subsidized by venture capitalists.” It looks like Uber is trying to overcome this with volume.Report
The article had a really difficult time distinguishing between:
1) Reasons I think Uber is bad, and
2) Reasons that the Uber business model is not financially viable.Report
Yeah, and I guess the other point is that even if Uber’s business model is not financially viable, I could still see the business purchased out of bankruptcy with the bad debt wiped-out and a new business model. Deadspin is still with us.Report
I don’t know what “rider fares only cover roughly 40 percent of a ride, with the remainder subsidized by venture capitalists,” Uber takes a percentage of each fare; if there’s a loss, it’s borne by the driver, not Uber.Report
That’s a good point; I’m quoting the article and now I’m not sure what that quote means.Report
PD,
Writing from Pittsburgh, Uber is trying to overcome this with automation.
Marketshare, then money — leave the drivers behind.Report
My understanding of Uber’s strategic business plan is
1. Drive traditional taxi businesses out of the market.
2. Raise prices.
There’s this other thing they do, which I think might have a place in the economy. Which is to utilize slack resources (vehicles and drivers) during peak demand times, which will result in more rides for riders and extra cash for people who already have cars which they use for other reasons.
I kind of don’t have a problem with that, actually.Report
No gondola paid for by the Arlington County government. If the Georgetown BID wants to foot the entire bill, (and/or go in with the private real estate honcos that own & lease the Rosslyn office towers) the government of Arlington won’t object, as far as I can tell.
(eta – I’ll admit, this is a thing that I would like, but I don’t want to pay for it at all)Report
The province of New Brunswick has some oddly specific criminal codes.Report
I mean, c’mon… they are complying with the spirit of the law. This is how you get Trudeau.Report
Given how these things generally work in reality, I’d guess that the law just says you’re not allowed to tow anything through a drive-through. Designed for people pulling trailers, for the most part.Report
IIRC at the time the cops were saying, essentially “we’re for sure going to charge them with something – we just have to figure out what. I mean, this has to be illegal somehow. It’s not like it’s come up before.”Report
Putting on my pendant hat: As a point of law, New Brunswick is absolutely forbidden to have any kind of criminal codes, let alone specific ones.
An American who can tell me why gets one imaginary internet Nanimao bar.Report
A. Just what is your hat hanging from? /pedant.
B. As a guess, because it is a sub-part of a larger jurisdiction that has the sole authority to promulgate criminal codes.Report
From the story about the men on the couch in the McDonald’s drive-through, the sentence “Two local men, aged 28 and 39, will face yet-to-be-determined charges” carries a pronounced flavor of “We know it ought to be illegal, but we’re not sure exactly which laws were violated.”Report
Driving with a load not properly tied down…Report
Failure to be properly restrained in a moving vehicle.Report
Thing is, it sounded to me like they weren’t driving on public roads – you can do all kinds of stupid stuff on a quad, as long as you don’t take it on a road.Report
This reminds me of a story that took place about an hour from me where three men tied up a dead horse to a truck and dragged it down the road, around the courthouse plaza, purportedly on their way to a landfill at 3 in the morning. They were supposedly helping a lady with a dead horse that was starting to decompose and they were dragging it to a landfill late at night to avoid a scene. They were caught, but no alcohol test was performed. The state’s attorney said the only charge he could find was improper disposal of a dead animal, as in pieces of the dead animal were deposited all along the street.Report
Shit.
One of my friends accidentally created an international incident… it was for littering.Report
You can beat the rap, you can beat a dead horse, but you can’t beat the rap for a dead horse.Report
Oh if only you’d waited one day to post these links…
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/03/technology/uber-greyball-program-evade-authorities.html
So I guess this is confirmation, as though it were really needed, that the sharing economy is mostly based on ignoring the laws that stop other people already doing the thing you want to do.Report
DD,
Tech Libertarian Iconoclasts.
Pretty much uber in a nutshell.Report
Of all the SF futures to end up in, why did it have to be cyberpunk?Report
If your regulation(s) result in a thriving black market, or widespread skirting/disobedience, you might be doing regulation wrong.
Or not, depending on what your true desired result is (see also: The Drug War).Report
“If your regulation(s) result in a thriving black market, or widespread skirting/disobedience, you might be doing regulation wrong.”
Thing is, we don’t look at black-market operators and say “wow, they have come up with an amazing new economic model which will totally result in a better world for everyone and we shouldn’t restrict what they’re doing”. We look at black-market operators and say “they’re breaking the law”.
The existence of a black market suggests that we should relax regulations, but I wouldn’t think that even the hardest of hardcore market-orthodoxists would suggest that a black market means we should allow people to flout the laws that exist.Report
Yeah, that isn’t what I am saying.Report