newreply.php posted:

quote:

"What happened over the weekend in New Delhi is horrific. Our entire team's hearts go out to the victim of this despicable crime. We will do everything, I repeat, everything to help bring this perpetrator to justice and to support the victim and her family in her recovery.

We will work with the government to establish clear background checks currently absent in their commercial transportation licensing programs. We will also partner closely with the groups who are leading the way on women's safety here in New Delhi and around the country and invest in technology advances to help make New Delhi a safer city for women."

quote:

On Saturday morning, as investigators from the Delhi Police scrambled to crack the case, they stumbled upon an unexpected hurdle—what is Uber and where is the company located?

"We found no records online," said Madhur Verma, deputy commissioner of police of north Delhi where the case has been registered. "It was a totally clueless situation." The cops searched online for a Delhi address for the San Francisco-headquartered company and couldn't find one.

It was already the dead of night when the police received the complaint—around 1.30 am—and the survivor was traumatised and needed medical attention. "It was frustrating because there was no information available on where they (Uber) were based out of," said a senior police officer investigating the case.

And then, Delhi Police decided to end their web search and step out on to the streets. They downloaded the Uber app and created a Paytm account to be able to pay—Uber in India accepts payments only through the third-party Paytm wallet.

Using the Paytm wallet app, they paid for a Uber cab and caught hold of the driver who was assigned to them. "We asked the driver to take us to the Uber office," said Verma, explaining how the police team finally found the Gurgaon office of the company.

quote:

OK, so I just got off the Phone with James River insurance Company. I am Not Happy. $1000 Dedcutible? Why? I'm a Contractor, out making you money. Why do I have to pay $1000 in order to file an insurance claim? My Personal Insurance is $500.... This is Not Cool..

AND Second... UBER is a Company Based upon Connecting Riders With Car Owning Drivers. My Part of the Deal is that I own a car. I use that car to make us both money. THERE IS NO RENTAL COVERAGE ON UBER'S INSURANCE??? How does this make sense? This means that while my car is out of commission No One makes Money.. To be Honest I'll be losing money. $1000 up front and Daily rental charges. The Contractor loses here. The UBER DRIVER LOSES.

I will be sharing this with every Uber driver I know and ones I don't. I'm still going to keep driving for UBER, I need the money to get me thru the Holidays, and I have a vehicle I can use. Lucky Me, Lucky You. Now I know. Have $1500 under the seat of my car while I'm out Ubering I'll need it. . .

Citizen Tayne posted:

Supreme Court rules against workers in warehouse security case

WASHINGTON -- Workers don’t have a federal right to be paid for time spent in post-shift security searches, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in a decision that will help Amazon.com Inc. fend off lawsuits seeking more than $100 million.

The justices unanimously rejected claims by former Amazon warehouse workers against the company that staffs many of the online retailer’s facilities. The case centered on the reach of federal wage laws.

The ruling, which comes in the middle of the retail industry’s busy holiday season, may shield other companies as well as Amazon. Apple Inc., CVS Health Corp., J.C. Penney Co., TJX Cos. and Ross Stores Inc. are all battling similar cases involving either distribution centers or stores.

Companies say screening is a valuable tool to guard against theft. Employees say what’s being stolen is their time.

In the case before the court, Jesse Busk and Laurie Castro said workers in two Nevada warehouses had to spend as much as 25 minutes after their shifts waiting to pass through metal detectors. Amazon disputes that characterization.

Amazon wasn’t directly involved in the Supreme Court case, which concerned its staffing company, Integrity Staffing Solutions Inc.

Citizen Tayne posted:

I may be a loving idiot who doesn't understand anything, but I'd figure that if my boss is making me do a thing and I have to do that thing to have my job, my boss should be paying me for that time.

BloombergView posted:

Tech Bubble Won't Burst In 2015. 2016?

It’s hard not to think about it as we ease into 2015, given that signs of froth have been building in tech since ever since the end of 2010, when acquisition prices and private company valuations started to soar. After four years of steep gains - of companies such as Salesforce.com hovering near all-time highs without ever turning a profit, of the Nasdaq creeping up on 5000 and at least one private company nearing a $25 billion (or more) valuation - shouldn’t something give?

All cycles being equal, of course we’ll see prices come down, eventually. But I don’t think it will happen for a few more quarters yet.

I’ve watched two crashes now - the end of the dotcom boom in 2000 and the credit collapse of 2008 - and one thing that was true of both is that a chorus of observers and analysts and Smart Money spent years saying that the tech sector was overinflated before anything actually burst.

In fact, the knowledge that valuations were hitting unsustainable highs seemed only to fuel the frenzy for venture firms, shareholders and banks to do deals at ever higher prices. That, in turn, kept those bubbles inflating well beyond the boundaries of rational pricing and investing.

As ex-Citigroup chief executive officer Chuck Prince said during the last go-round, offering all of us a permanent memento of a certain type of CEO, someone trapped by the forces of irrational exuberance, someone less a corporate steward and more a suitor at a cotillion: “When the music stops… things will be complicated. But as long as the music is playing, you’ve got to get up and dance.” Or as Daniel Cohen, a venture investor recently told me, “We know that the question is, 'When does the cycle turn?' But until then there’s lots of money to be made.”

It’s clear that there’s money to be made in Silicon Valley right now, and no one wants the boom to end.

The effervescence that dominated the final few years of both of the previous market booms was largely due to low interest rates, which, perversely, pushed piles of cash from around the globe into asset classes yielding the best return. The lower the rates, the loftier the inflation. That’s also where we find ourselves today.

Tanya Beder, a former hedge fund manager and founder of the asset advisory firm SBCC, describes her outlook for 2015: “Right now the global economy is driven by policy, not fundamentals. And that has made the U.S. the least worst place to invest.” The U.S. recently posted higher-than-expected GDP growth at a time when China’s growth is slowing, the Euro zone is struggling and Japan has dipped into a recession. Thanks to low interest rates, investments with some of the highest returns include private companies and tech, along with risky fare like junk bonds.

Take a short drive up and down the venture enclave of Sand Hill Road in Menlo Park and you’ll experience the global chase for higher returns first hand. VC firms are flush with cash, thanks in part to the equities bull market. Real estate prices are soaring. (Beder says she pays twice as much for her Sand Hill digs as she did for prime Manhattan real estate.) Guys from private equity firms and sovereign wealth funds are getting more active in the venture world. Lawyers are working to help startup employees cash out and sell their equity to private buyers. It's all a lovely, lucrative, frothy stir of money, ideas, and ambition.

The economists at Goldman Sachs seem to believe that Beder’s “best of the worst” scenario for the U.S. will last at least another year. They predicted in a recent note that the Federal Reserve won’t raise interest rates until next September, and until then the U.S. recovery will far outpace Europe's efforts to bounce back. According to economic forecasts housed on the Bloomberg terminal, the U.S. will have 3 percent GDP growth in 2015 and a 5 percent unemployment rate, compared with GDP growth of 1.2 percent and an unemployment rate of 11.4 percent for the Euro zone.

Goldman also predicts that oil prices will stay low and act as a stimulus for consumer spending. The oil trend should also bring down core inflation numbers, give central banks around the world room to keep rates low and force investors to continue picking off higher-risk assets in search of rich returns.

I think we have another several quarters of dramatic growth left for Silicon Valley and the broader world of tech stocks. Still, the next bubbly stretch will be dangerous for acquirers and investors, and not just because they'll be buying at lofty prices. It’s because if it winds up being the tail end of the cycle, those who arrived late to the dance may find themselves in trouble when the music stops and they discover everyone else has left the ball already.

Sham bam bamina! posted:

what's a bubel? is it like a bagel or somtehing?

Citizen Tayne posted:

Stymie is right though.

PokeJoe posted:

i can walk to the train station.

quote:

An Uber driver brought a female passenger back to the Albany Park apartment he shared with his wife and sexually assaulted her on a couch, prosecutors said Tuesday.
After the attack, Maxime Fohounhedo told the 22-year-old woman, “I made you happy,” prosecutors said. A judge set bail for Fohounhedo at $500,000 and banned him from driving for the online ride-sharing service while the case is in court.

“He will not be Ubering anybody,” said Judge Peggy Chiampas during a bond hearing.

The woman was out with friends from work when she used the Uber X app on her phone to arrange a ride to her West Rogers Park home early on Nov. 16, prosecutors said

Fohounhedo arrived shortly before 3 a.m. in a black four-door car, and the woman got in the back seat, said Assistant State’s Attorney Robert Mack. The woman fell asleep as Fohounhedo drove onto a highway, he said.

After exiting the highway, Fohounhedo stopped the car and asked the woman to get into the front because he was having trouble finding her address, Mack said.

The woman -- who prosecutors said was intoxicated -- got into the front and fell asleep, waking when Fohounhedo turned into an alley and stopped the car behind an apartment building, Mack said.

Fohounhedo then grabbed the woman’s left hand and placed it in his pants, Mack said. The woman pulled her hand away and fell asleep again.

She awoke inside Fohounhedo’s apartment with the Uber driver assaulting her on a leather couch in the living room, Mack said. Afterward, Fohounhedo helped her out of the building and put her back in the car, telling her, “I made you happy,” Mack said.

After being dropped off at her home, the woman texted a friend and said she had been sexually assaulted, he said. When the woman woke up later that day, she called police and was taken to Swedish Covenant Hospital, where a rape kit was conducted.

Fohounhedo’s Uber account is in his wife’s name but his photo and phone number are on the account, Mack said. Fohounhedo’s attorney said he shares the account with his wife.

GPS coordinates show the victim’s phone was in Fohounhedo’s apartment at the time of the attack and the woman was able to identify photos taken of the inside and outside of his apartment, Mack said.

She also identified Fohounhedo in a physical lineup.

Weeks later, in early December, Uber officials said the driver had been removed from service while police investigated the allegations.

Fohounhedo, of the 4400 block of North Lawndale Avenue, has been charged with criminal sexual assault and criminal sexual abuse, police said. It is the first time he has been arrested, according to an arrest report.

His attorney said Fohounhedo, who has lived in Chicago for three years, was born in the West African country of Benin and that his first language is French. Fohounhedo indicated to a judge that he understood the proceedings.

quote:

NEW DELHI: The Delhi Transport Department has modified the 2006 Radio Taxi Scheme, to allow aggregators of taxis to also be eligible for a radio taxi license. This is meant ostensibly to allow web-based aggregator apps such as Uber and Ola to function. But the gap in the operating model between a traditional radio cab fleet operator such as Meru and an app-based aggregator such as Ola is so vast that the rules might end up usurping the ease and advantage such companies had.

The move comes three weeks after a woman was raped inside a Uber cab in the city, triggering government scrutiny of such cab services. Uber was ordered off the roads in Delhi, while other aggregators such as Ola continue to operate.

Under the revised rules, a copy of which is at the end of this story, all radio taxi fleet operators as well as aggregators of radio taxis, are now eligible for a radio taxi license, provided they meet a long list of requirements. Before the changes, only operators of radio taxi fleets were eligible.

Under the new rules, radio taxi providers would need to follow all rules under the 1988 Motor Vehicles Act and the 2000 Information Technology Act. Any applicant for a license will need to be registered under the Companies Act and must be mandated to provide public transport services.

Companies such as Uber and Ola are tech companies and maintain that they only provide the technology backbone, while the cabs run on the permit and license issued to the cab owner. They currently do not hold a radio taxi license and to apply now, they would have to change the fundamental nature of their operations.

The list of requirements are long and onerous. For instance, every car must be fitted with a GPRS/GPS-based tracking system with a printer unit and a panic button that will alert the control room or a nearest police station. The unit must transmit back to a central control room the real time location of the cab.

Companies such as Uber and Ola provide an app that connects users with drivers. The phone, usually an Apple iPhone, acts as the GPS unit. But there is no GPS unit with a printer, or a central control room.

Part of the reason why companies such as Ola and Uber attract such high valuations from investors in the lack of need to establish infrastructure such as office premises, control rooms, call centres and parking spaces, which would all be subject to their own set of regulations in different cities and countries.

Under the new rules, all radio taxi providers including these app-based taxi aggregators will need to have at least a fleet of 200 radio taxis, and must provide adequate parking space for all of them. They would also need to have a registered office within the city, and provide their contact information to the transport department.

Moreover, they would have to maintain a call centre or web portal with all their information, including the fare structure, clearly listed in the website. A service for customer feedback and grievances need also be maintained by the cab company.

The transport department directive also lists several mandatory regulations that both the driver and the vehicles used as cabs need to adhere to in order to function legally. Licenses for these cab services will be provided for only five and a half years at a time, and will need to be renewed every five years.

Fundamentally, the Delhi government has retained an older model of radio taxi operations and has added that web-based aggregators will be allowed, without studying their business model. This will help traditional radio taxi fleets and make life very difficult for app-based aggregators.

ultramiraculous posted:

there were actual cases of people with bad background checks driving ubers, right? i'm calling bullshit on them even spending the...$50?...to get even a scummy background check.

Luigi Thirty posted:

in India they didn't bother at all until after a rash of assaults because the laws said they didn't have to run livery drivers through background checks

kraftwerk singles posted:

Basically there's two kinds of ppl. Bad people and Good people. I'm one of the good people because my thoughts are correct and I don't even have to think about them anymore. Also kill all nerds.

quote:

I have a knife. Its extended when I'm driving (I close it when I'm done). I have it sitting to my left side, in between my seat and my door. This way the person cant see it and I can safely grip it while still driving.
Had a couple of occassions where I needed to grasp it for the entirety of the ride. They were ultimately just extra drunk, but you have to stay paranoid, especially at the late hours.
Im an LA driver too. And after hearing the muggings that happened in our city to uber drivers, theres certain areas I avoid turning on the app. Anywhere above the 105 and below the 10 is a dead zone to me. Ill drop off passengers there, but I wont go back online until im back downtown or wherever.

qirex posted:

why did this driver "need" to grasp a knife for a whole ride? if the passenger doesn't know it doesn't change their behavior at all and at that point it's literally a religious totem I mean it's really hard to stab someone in your back seat anyway

As a Millennial I posted:

link

quote:

Uber drivers in many of the company's major markets are making about $6 an hour more than their traditional — and professional — taxi-driver counterparts, according to a rare analysis of internal data the company released Thursday along with Princeton economist Alan Krueger. In Washington, the difference is about $4.60, in San Francisco it's about $10 and in New York it's closer to $15.

These gross earnings don't account for the considerable costs drivers pay to deploy their own cars as modern-day taxis. But Uber argues that these numbers paint a picture of decent work in a shifting economy where tens of thousands of people — nearly half of them with college degrees — have recently found supplemental income and more flexibility doing a job that has long been the domain of immigrants and middle-aged men.

...

There has been a shortage of hard data to answer these questions — Are these good jobs? Would they even exist in a better economy? — as platforms such as Uber have proliferated over the past five years. Krueger argues that the numbers Uber is releasing now point to the first picture — Uber as the promising future of work — and not the second.

"When I looked through the survey, I was struck by how many of the drivers already had jobs when they started," says Krueger, who says he had full discretion over his research. "They joined Uber not out of desperation, but because it offered new opportunity that could help them smooth their income, smooth fluctuations from other jobs, and add a supplement to their household income. The more I looked into it, the more I thought this rapid growth is really not a result of a weak job market, but the result of a new opportunity."

quote:

Previously, Professor Krueger served as Chairman of President Barack Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers and a Member of his Cabinet from November 2011 to August 2013. He also served as Assistant Secretary for Economic Policy and Chief Economist of the U.S. Department of the Treasury in 2009-10, and as Chief Economist at the U.S. Department of Labor in 1994-95.

Main Paineframe posted:

laffo


they're comparing uber drivers' gross income to taxi drivers' net incom

Maluco Marinero posted:

Ding ding ding. 1- they don't have the data, and 2, if they had the data they wouldnt want to publish the data. It would be plain as day that Uber is economically no better, and likely worse for drivers and riders alike.

Wells posted:

What's the benefit for them gathering the data? how does it increase their profits? They could have gotten the data if they spent money and time collecting it, but that doesn't really give them anything useful in the realm of making more money.

I guess what I'm saying is don't missattribute this to intentional deception. it's just lazy+greedy

also the bit about tori's penus

Pinterest Mom posted:

i love davos

Necc0 posted:

what i see is a convergence of federal road standards and self driving cars moving towards each other. once cars with certain drive-assist features pass a certain critical-mass threshold the feds will probably begin laying down 'compliant' highway standards and such that will help cars even more. so certain highways and major roads become ones where you're allowed to take a snooze on and it expands from there. i doubt that will ever reach 100% coverage or even past anything but major interstates

daft punk railroad posted:

do people not realize that you can just slow cook bbq at home and spend that time doing literally anything else

duTrieux. posted:

Fact is, anyone doing this job that isn't carrying something for protection is ignorant.

I carry a stun gun and a knife. The knife I carry will easily penetrate from the front to back. With a little twist, you're not making it out alive. Let that be a warning for anyone that wants to get out of line.
I had some jack rear end juvenile hop in my car one night when I had two clients in the back seat. As far as I am concerned, that's breaking and entering with intent to do harm. I pulled the stun gun, discharged it and told him the next one is going through his body, get out now. He looked like a deer in the headlights, like he couldn't believe what was happening. He jumped out of the car, then as I was leaving decided to confront me again, asking me if I was serious. I told him, lets call the police and discuss it with them. Let's see if they consider what you did utterly moronic. His friends pulled him away. Yeah, just great dealing with the lucid alcoholic. The fact of the matter is, they weren't even my client. Jumping into a car that doesn't belong to you, I consider aggressive behavior, especially when your intent is not clear. Stupid kids. If I would've shot him, then what? I would be the new zimmerman because I didn't act accordingly. Sorry, but if it looks like a goose and quacks like a goose, then I say let's eat foie gras.

Mr. Nice! posted:

you should never quote a stymie

Main Paineframe posted:

uber getting sued for their terrible safety practices

Mr Dog posted:

probably just a massmail blast to all people who have used uber (maybe in the last x days or more than y times idk)

there's plenty of actual comically evil poo poo to hate about uber without needing to make up more

quote:

Unfortunately, Uber has gone back on its word that it would do "everything" to support Plaintiff in her courageous recovery. Despite knowing Ms. Doe's identity and having the means to reach her, Uber has shunned and avoided all contact with Ms. Doe and her family. Furthermore, as a demonstration of the Company's relentless determination to profit at the expense of anything or anyone standing in its way, Uber ignored Plaintiff's request to be consulted with in regard to any safety reforms Uber undertakes in India, and instead, boasted about reopening its business operations in India, despite a governmental ban.

Pinterest Mom posted: