thisfinecrew | background on Lyft vs Uber, etc

Note: c&ping from my journal, where I posted it this afternoon. There have been developments since then.

Last night, the NY taxi drivers announced a one-hour strike to protest the Muslim ban. Half an hour after the strike ended, Uber tweeted: "Surge pricing has been turned off at #JFK Airport. This may result in longer wait times. Please be patient."

People claimed that Uber had broken the NY taxi driver's strike, and that, plus its CEO's insistence that the company collaborate with the orange Fuhrer's administration, made #deleteuber trend. As I'm writing this post right now, it is the second most trending hashtag in the US, behind #StopPresidentBannon.

15 points:

(1) Shortly after the elections, in an internal memo, Uber CTO Thuan Pham, who escaped Vietnam as a child in 1979, called our orange Fuhrer a deplorable person, and pledged to help defeat him and his destructive agenda. (additional source)

(2) At least one source at Uber (though if this sentiment wasn't implicitly/explicitly endorsed all the way to the top I will eat my shoe) felt that it was inappropriate for an executive to do this. That it was a regrettable, if understandable, lapse in judgement on Pham's part (those poor, unfortunate refugee pocs that get all fuddled and emotional about a fascist's rise to power...)

(3) On 12/14, Uber CEO Travis Kalanick joined Trump's business advisory group, modeling collaboration and partnership as the rational, principled response. He further emphasized the point at the company's next all-hands meeting, when, as CNN put it: "Uber's CEO drove home a simple message to employees this week: We must work with President Trump." (additional source)

(4) After the Muslim ban yesterday, Uber's CEO Kalanick released a Facebook post titled standing up for what's right. To paraphrase:

The company has reached out to the families of the ~dozen employees affected and will compensate them pro-bono for the three months the ban is in effect, details to come (drivers earn anywhere from $7,000 to $12,000 depending on which statistics you're using per driver, so total cost to Uber might be $84,000 to $144,000 -- about half the yearly average compensation of their engineers/developers/data scientists and a ridiculously tiny portion of everything else).

Kalanick will also bring up the many innocent people this ban impacts in the first business advisory group meeting, demonstrating how necessary a seat at our orange Fuhrer's table is.

Kalanick did not join the advisory council hoping to gain economic advantage. Rather, he is bravely marching forward (despite short-sighted criticisms from some overly emotional pocs, one assumes) and taking one for the team, maybe to his detriment.

(5) The NYC taxi driver strike happens, with neither Lyft or Uber commenting on it. Half an hour after the strike end, UberNYC releases its tweet. There are reports that Uber had also turned off surge pricing during the strike. A lot of people (including me) delete their Uber accounts.

As twitter user @MilesKlee put it: "I don't need a ride to Vichy."

(6) In my experience, the majority of Uber's drivers are those most vulnerable to Trump's policies -- working-class immigrants and pocs. Almost all of them contract with Lyft as well as Uber, and I've yet to come across any that prefer the latter. Uber takes a higher percentage of money, offers less incentives for full-time drivers, is less transparent in its pricing, and doesn't allow for tips (according to my last driver, because "they won't get any percentage of the tip so of course they won't put that in the app, no matter how many drivers ask for it"). The only reason drivers keep both is that more people use Uber.

(7) Uber has one of the most delusional cultures I've come across, even by Silicon Valley standards. I can't name any Silicon Valley company that does not believe that it is paving the way for a brighter, more enlightened future for all mankind -- but Uber does this while openly boasting about knee-capping competitor's funding rounds, sabotaging other drivers, treating its own drivers like disposable cogs, ignoring safety concerns, I could go on for ages. Yet listen to its executives and employees talk and you'll be surprised that the company hasn't been awarded a Nobel Peace Prize yet.

(8) That said, despite its more cuddly image (and fear among some Silicon Valley VCs that it might be too nice to survive), Lyft is far from the knight in shining armor. Neither Lyft nor Uber pay its drivers what they should. Lyft's founders have promised their drivers that they absolutely will not sell; small birdies have told people who have told other people who have told me and Forbes and quite a few others that this is exactly what they're looking to do. Lyft denies the claims, but then again, if the choice is between denying rumors or losing market share, there is no choice at all. And of course, both Lyft and Uber drivers were active during the strike.

(9) One of Lyft's major investors is Peter Thiel, a.k.a. our orange Fuhrer's most vocal Silicon Valley supporter and member of his transition team.

He's given a lukewarm defense of the Muslim ban, stating that it is not a religious test.

(10) To elaborate on the above: the tech side of Silicon Valley is one of the most incestuous environments I've ever experienced. Peter Thiel's VC firm Founder's Fund has its fingers in a lot of pies, including a $200 million investment in AirBnB.

AirBnB is providing free housing to anyone stranded because of the Muslim ban.

Lyft's co-founders have pledged $1 million over four years to the ACLU, which is also a ridiculously tiny portion of their net worth/revenues/etc. But they also released a letter to all Lyft users that I thought was pretty awesome. The full text is here.

(11) Peter Thiel's VC fund is also a major investor in Tesla, whose CEO Elon Musk (rumored to be one of the absolute worst bosses ever) also sits on our orange Fuhrer's advisory council. Here's his hedging response to the Muslim ban.

(12) There are 19 companies in that advisory council, including General Motors, JP Morgan Chase, Walt Disney, Boston Consulting Group, Walmart, IBM, GE, and Pepsi. None except for Tesla and Uber have given any statements even lukewarmly critical of Trump's policies.

(13) Chase Bank (now merged with JP Morgan Chase) has a history of partnering with fascists, and during the Nazi regime "froze European Jewish customers' accounts and were extremely cooperative in providing banking service to Germany".

(14) IBM has a similar history of collaboration. It custom-built machines that allowed Nazis to ensure that the trains ran on time, among other things. One was the death calculator:

IBM, primarily through its German subsidiary, made Hitler's program of Jewish destruction a technologic mission the company pursued with chilling success. IBM Germany, using its own staff and equipment, designed, executed, and supplied the indispensable technologic assistance Hitler's Third Reich needed to accomplish what had never been done before-the automation of human destruction. More than 2,000 such multi-machine sets were dispatched throughout Germany, and thousands more throughout German-dominated Europe. Card sorting operations were established in every major concentration camp. People were moved from place to place, systematically worked to death, and their remains cataloged with icy automation.

IBM Germany, known in those days as Deutsche Hollerith Maschinen Gesellschaft, or Dehomag, did not simply sell the Reich machines and then walk away. IBM's subsidiary, with the knowledge of its New York headquarters, enthusiastically custom-designed the complex devices and specialized applications as an official corporate undertaking.

(15) Technology has advanced a lot since then. For example, there is this.