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Uber's $81m tax bill wiped as it doesn't 'pay' drivers
(www.canberratimes.com.au)
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this post was submitted on 18 Sep 2024
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I think Uber might be the pinnacle of a vaporware tech corporation.
Remember they were gonna make self driving cars? (On paper anyway) Like that was the original selling point idea thing. Then it just became "oh, well, we drove all the taxis out of business... now we have slaves essentially. Well, this works too! Oh, btw, they aren't our employees. Oh, also btw, we will absolutely still be collecting our massive chuck every time a ride happens."
Another situation I try to sort out like "ok. Cool. So, all the drivers should just use an open source app "Not Uber" which is literally just Uber, but, you know, not." They could even charge the same prices to riders and the drivers keep all (maybe minus some minimum amount to maintain the app) the profits, perhaps boosting them to almost a fair wage.
As it stands, drivers assume all the risks, must have insurance, are responsible for cleaning their vehicles, gas, normal wear and tear, apparently also will be responsible for taxes (self employed I suppose?), etc. Uber does absolutely fuck all except they made an app like 10-15 years ago, were first to market (first big anyway) and dominated by offering artificially low pricing to customers.
But this would require some sort of Mass Effect style or Borg shit where the leader assumes direct control and tells people to stop using the Uber app and instead use this other Not Uber app... but in that case, why not just also command them to embrace communism?
Which leads me to my new solution for the world: communism brain worms. We get a sample of that RFK Jr worm(s), we find out how it made him cut the head off a whale, and we reprogram it to cut the head off... well, some sort of head, who can say what head?
Like most big tech it is just a financial scam attempting to get monopoly marketshare and then jack up prices. Their technology is, itself, pedestrian.
Why do I get the feeling that if local DOTs created their own Uber alternatives it will be shut down because muh IP infringement!
Probably, though DOTs are all governed in the exact opposite way. They are always looking for ways to have zero in-house staff for anything remotely technical. They just want to contract everything out to the private sector.
They love to give Uber, Lyft, and Google money for traffic data, for example. They can't imagine doing GPS data aggregation themselves even when they are surrounded by 20 companies that can all do it. Hiring technical staff is somehow unfeasible even though they are still paying a company that employees technical staff and charges overhead. Part of it is that some of the companies do have little monopolies (e.g. Google Maps. Buy most of it is simply neoliberalism. Departments were gutted to cut costs with a promise that contracting to private industry would save money. Now that it is obviously not doing so, they can't reverse course because the people controlling the purse strings need to be buddy-buddy with hr contractors to get that sweet Chamber of Commerce campaign support.
Think this was always the goal, the self-driving taxis thing was just the pitch to get a bunch of capital investment. They did burn through billions on self-driving, but I think ultimately they always wanted to collect a (steep) rent from unlicensed taxis.