
Show HN: Taxi Wars – Stories from the front line - taxicabjesus
http://www.taxiwars.org
======
taxicabjesus
This is not a typical ‘Show HN’, but I checked with the mods & Daniel
encouraged it.

Three months ago, in the comments to HN submission 'RIP Kuro5hin', I posted
[1] about my story having been the last to post, and that I was thinking about
getting a domain of my own. One of you responded, "Please do that. I enjoyed
your stories, particularly 'Who Are Your Lifelines?'"

[1]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11609802](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11609802)

All of the current blog posts at my new site -
[http://www.TaxiWars.org/](http://www.TaxiWars.org/) \- were originally posted
as diaries at kuro5hin.org (K5). I'd started blogging about my taxi passengers
at K5 in March, 2012, after my eighth lease. My original intention was to help
me better remember all the interesting people I was meeting. I posted at K5
because I wanted to be anonymous, and was not looking for attention (the site
had already shrunk to a skeleton core of users at that time).

K5 users voted three of my story submissions to the site’s front page, and one
to section.

“Electronic Taxi Dispatch, v1.0” is about how the taxi company’s pre-
smartphone/pre-tablet GPS-enabled computerized dispatch system matches
passengers with cabs: [http://www.taxiwars.org/electronic-taxi-
dispatch-v1.0/](http://www.taxiwars.org/electronic-taxi-dispatch-v1.0/)

“Who Are Your Lifelines?” is about the time that I bailed my passenger out of
jail. He was a down-on-his-luck tech worker. He’d called me because he
remembered my phone number. [http://www.taxiwars.org/who-are-your-
lifelines/](http://www.taxiwars.org/who-are-your-lifelines/)

“Humanity’s Second-Best Hope” is about the dreadful seasonal job that I had
just before I started taxi driving, mixed with some 2012-era political
commentary: [http://www.taxiwars.org/humanitys-second-best-
hope/](http://www.taxiwars.org/humanitys-second-best-hope/)

The section story was an anecdote of no importance. It needs some editing.

The pages and posts are basically as I submitted them to K5, except I’ve moved
the pictures and youtube videos into the stories (K5 did not allow inline
images).

Speaking of youtube… The passenger whom I rescued from his new ‘friends’ built
websites for people, iirc: [http://www.taxiwars.org/2012/07/passenger-
rescue.html](http://www.taxiwars.org/2012/07/passenger-rescue.html)
[http://www.taxiwars.org/2012/08/passenger-rescue-
pt-2.html](http://www.taxiwars.org/2012/08/passenger-rescue-pt-2.html)

This post is about why I decided to call my K5 account ‘TaxiCabJesus’:
[http://www.taxiwars.org/2013/04/origin-of-tcj-
moniker.html](http://www.taxiwars.org/2013/04/origin-of-tcj-moniker.html)

That post mentions Michael Crawford (whom I believe was K5 user ‘Zombie Jesus
Christ’), who witnessed a murder while a student at CalTech. He eventually
graduated with a physics degree from a California State university, but has
struggled with mental health issues ever since. He was a prolific diarist at
K5. Some of my K5 diaries were about visiting him in the San Luis Obispo
county jail, that time he was arrested for stealing ketchup packets from
McDonald’s (they dropped the charges and released him the day after I
visited).

I kept notes about almost all my passengers. Some of the stories that I
haven’t posted are of some importance. I plan to narrate “Ordinary Rendition”
and get my EMACS friend from college (I suffered through a $100,000 computer
science program) to help me find someone to help with animation…

 __*

Thanks for reading this far. If you have any comments or suggestions about my
little website (layout, etc), I’ll very much appreciate them!

~~~
jonah
_If you have any comments or suggestions..._

You can add " / cover" to the background: CSS definition on the body or add
the separate property "background-size: cover;" to make the image not tile on
larger screens.

Great writing, I really enjoy your vérité style.

~~~
taxicabjesus
It's a stock blogger theme. I've looked into adding this css
definition/property, but it's a bit past my competency as a webmaster. I
imagine myself breaking something else, and not knowing how to fix that
either.

> Great writing, I really enjoy your vérité style.

thanks... I do some writing on other topics too, and try to keep 'fluff' to a
minimum.

------
erdevs
I didn't read a lot of these. And I'm a naturally skeptical person, so forgive
the following observation. In every story I read, you seem to offer sage
advice which people are almost immediately receptive and responsive to, even
in dire or exigent situations. In my experience, people are rarely so
responsive when flooded emotionally. In other stories, you're saving the day
by calling cops when needed, etc. It seems like you're painting the picture of
yourself as a sort of heroic sage. That's alright, I suppose, but it smells
funny to my (admittedly skeptical) nose.

I'm glad you checked with mods before posting and if this is cool with them,
then it's cool with me. But this smacks of self-promotion to me.

Also... Mitt Romney as a freedom fighter from the future who can help us stop
Amazon's Skynet? Okay. Maybe I skimmed too quickly by this point, or I missed
the metaphor, but this seems a little whack.

~~~
taxicabjesus
> It seems like you're painting the picture of yourself as a sort of heroic
> sage. That's alright, I suppose, but it smells funny to my (admittedly
> skeptical) nose.

Having an online persona called "TaxiCabJesus" led me to make an extra effort.
Some of the company's other taxi drivers have gone the extra mile to do nice
things for their passengers too. But it doesn't pay the bills. Or it gets
complaints filed against you, when people take it the wrong way.

There are around 44 diaries, written over the course of about 4 years. So
that's less than 1 a month. For most of my tenure, I drove 4 12-hour shifts a
week. There was nothing special about most of my fares.

> In every story I read, you seem to offer sage advice which people are almost
> immediately receptive and responsive to

The early diaries were a little different in tone to the later ones. Very few
passengers were receptive... they'd think something I said was "interesting",
then they carried on as before, as I expected - free advice is usually worth
what's charged. Every once-in-a-while I'd get someone who appreciated my
efforts - these passengers made it all worthwhile. I haven't written about
most of them.

> Also... Mitt Romney as a freedom fighter from the future who can help us
> stop Amazon's Skynet? Okay. Maybe I skimmed too quickly by this point, or I
> missed the metaphor, but this seems a little whack.

This was mostly written as a tongue-in-cheek exercise to apply the 'skynet'
metaphor to Amazon, and to the political system we find ourselves subjected
to. Corporations and the political establishment make more sense if you figure
they're run by autonomous war machines.

(EDIT: I _enjoyed_ writing 'Humanity's Second-Best Hope' more than anything
else I've ever written.)

> But this smacks of self-promotion to me.

'Who Are Your Lifelines' is a public-service announcement that I hope helps
people think about who they'd call if they needed to get bailed out. People
who are stuck in jail are helpless to do anything to defend themselves.

'Electronic Taxi Dispatch v1.0' points out that the 50-bazillion dollar
"ridesharing" company is only selling a reinvented wheel.

Right now this is just about pointing out the fallacies of the status quo /
'conventional thinking'. At the start of my little journey, all I knew was
that some things weren't quite right in my understanding of the world. Because
I spent three and a half years in a taxi, dealing with all sorts of people, I
think I've figured a few things out. This is my effort to share my
experiences. It's on Hacker News now because another user here said they'd
appreciated what I'd written on Kuro5hin.

Thanks for your comment.

~~~
erdevs
Thanks for your kindly and thoughtful reply.

I'm glad you learned through your experiences and it's nice of you to want to
share what you can.

Regarding "Skynet" and automation at Amazon, I think this is fertile ground
for metaphor and for science fiction parable. Some great works of imagination
have been created in this vein already. So, I'm onboard with that, personally.
I get lost at calling Obama an AI of some kind or Romney a time traveler, but
I understand you were joking in a way. I just didn't get the joke, but that's
probably on me.

4 years of interacting with several humans a day in one-time or small groups
in a fairly closed, intimate environments will almost certainly lead to
interesting stories. And to many, many opportunities to demonstrate compassion
and care. So, I believe that, certainly. I am skeptical about the stories you
described of holding people's heads in just such a way so as to relieve
pressure and bring emotional balance in the same way that I am skeptical about
ads that proclaim a simple pill can grow the size of a man's genitals or that
"one weird trick" causes dramatic and rapid weight loss. But, as I said, that
skepticism is part of my questioning and curious nature, so it's nothing
personal or specific and I hope it didn't come across as such. (By the way...
I may well have missed it, but do you have a more detailed description of this
technique and some knowledge or theories on the pathways by which it works? If
this works, it should be taught and popularized!)

Thanks again for your reply and I wish you well. It's great that you take a
compassionate point of view and apparently try to help people whenever
possible. I wouldn't want my questions here to take anything away from that
general principle.

~~~
taxicabjesus
One of the recurring themes for the diaries was how one fare leads into the
next... If not for this person going there, I wouldn't have met that person,
who I learned something interesting from, or who needed more than just a ride.

> (By the way... I may well have missed it, but do you have a more detailed
> description of this technique and some knowledge or theories on the pathways
> by which it works? If this works, it should be taught and popularized!)

The self-appointed gatekeepers to conventional medicine are hostile to the
theories about why it works.

[http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22122417](http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22122417)

