
“Why you should not use Uber (the car ride brokering company)” - jpatokal
https://stallman.org/uber.html
======
cjbprime
> Uber plans to do away with human cab drivers.

> It would be easy for a non-plutocratic government to prohibit this, and
> that's what every country ought to do, unless/until every person gets an
> adequate basic income so people don't need to be employed.

Okay, so I am _extremely_ liberal and everything, but "let's ban any new
technologies that might make somebody lose their job to a robot" is seriously
the most ridiculous argument I've ever heard RMS make. What the hell.

~~~
agildehaus
It's nearly in the job description of every software engineer to create things
that ease people's workloads or replace their jobs entirely. I bet Stallman's
projects, and the free software movement itself, are responsible for the non-
existence of numerous jobs.

Also: basic income, or whatever it is that will make sense when there aren't
enough jobs to go around, won't be preemptive.

~~~
glesica
> Also: basic income, or whatever it is that will make sense when there aren't
> enough jobs to go around, won't be preemptive.

Seems like this is really his point, if it isn't going to be preemptive, then
(he feels) we should stop the jobs from going away.

~~~
baddox
And that's the problem. If basic income won't happen until technological
advancement causes mass unemployment, and governments ban technological
advancement that might lead to mass unemployment, then we will get neither
technological advancement nor basic income.

~~~
glesica
Why can't basic income happen first? Or why can't basic income be phased in
smoothly? I mean, don't get me wrong, I agree with you that basic income is
_unlikely_ to happen until there has been an incredible amount of pain and
suffering, but does it have to be that way? Not necessarily. If we, as a
society, set compensating policies as a condition for technological progress,
then the progress might come more slowly, but it will still come. Of course
I'm probably being a crazy person thinking that our government might act
rationally. :(

------
michaelvkpdx
"Then what will you do, if you don't want to tell Big Brother where you are
going?"

RMS is right on again, as always. The problem is that the younger generation
wants Big Brother to know everything, and that is sad and scary. One need look
no further than the comments on this thread for proof.

We are not teaching our children the value of humanity, and the way that
privacy creates a sense of self. "Self" is now what you make it on
Twitter/Facebook/SocialNetDuJour. Sharing everything in a way that
government/Facebook/Google can monitor ("Big Brother") is like breathing to
the youth who've had iPhones since before puberty.

So many younger programmers think RMS is absurd. They don't even have context
to understand where he comes from. RMS has been foretelling the future since
the days of the GNU wars. He's an ideologue, yes, but one whose points have
always been valid.

Even the term "Big Brother". It's from George Orwell's book "1984". I wonder
how many younger programmers would know that.

~~~
Igglyboo
>Even the term "Big Brother". It's from George Orwell's book "1984". I wonder
how many younger programmers would know that.

Probably most of them. 1984 is required reading in many highschools in
america.

------
sshconnection
I agree that the government shouldn't have pervasive access to the records,
but I WANT Uber to track my rides. That's how I can have recourse if a driver
takes me for a spin. I WANT my driver to be identified and for them to track
who picks me up. He claims that it's troublesome for a female passenger to be
identifiable to a driver. How about if you're a female (or male) driver
driving in your spare time? Would she not feel safer picking up someone who is
at least somewhat identified versus a shady looking stranger?

One of the crucial components of sharing apps is the building of trust and
accountability. Identification is part of that.

This list of complaints doesn't hold water for me.

~~~
click170
Granted there are several items that ... detract from the point, but there are
some real problems here and I don't think it does them justice to gloss over
them because of some errant points at the beginning.

We don't see eye to eye on the identification issue, but even if we put that
one issue aside I can't agree that the list of complaints doesn't hold water
for me personally.

Executives stalking passengers and trolling through passenger ride data to
ferret out alarming narratives crosses a line in my opinion. This starts to
get into discussions of which data belongs to whom, which is a discussion that
I don't think has been had yet, and I don't like the assertion of ownership
over my data that many companies are making.

We agree that part of building sharing apps is building trust and
accountability, but I disagree that Uber has done a good job of earning our
trust _or_ demonstrating accountability.

Edit: changed some loaded phrasing

~~~
GauntletWizard
The first half of the post is RMS's usual loaded rant on what 'freedom' means.
He's a weird brand of anarchocommunist, and axiomatically doesn't believe in
running any code that you can't see the source to and haven't compiled
yourself. That sets him up to start off most of his rants that might otherwise
have a point with a bunch of bullshit that we've all seen and laughed at
before.

~~~
click170
> that we've all seen and laughed at before

Let's be fair, he's been right about a LOT of things. Things that we _did_
laugh at him for saying.

Maybe we shouldn't have laughed so hard.

------
KyleBrandt
I find Taxis to be very stressful when traveling for two main reasons:

* I'd guess about 10% of the time they don't show up, so I have to bake in extra travel time for that. With uber I can see on my phone that they are actually coming.

* With uber I know payment is all set, Taxi's will often say that their credit card machine is broken.

I imagine these problems could start to get solved with a good open source
software suite (with client mobile apps) and an organization to bring this
technology to cab companies. Of course, _creating something is hard_ , raising
complaints is not. The cognitive dissonance for me is that a creator like RMS
would write something like this instead of trying to lead people towards
creating a solution.

~~~
simoncion
> Taxi's will often say that their credit card machine is broken.

Then, insist that they break out the manual credit-card processor and carbon
paper. If they refuse, offer to have them call the cops. Their payment-
processing hardware will probably magically start working.

~~~
KyleBrandt
That sort of confrontation is where some of the stress comes from. Also when
that happens I just say I don't have enough cash (which is generally true).

------
GabrielF00
RMS doesn't use credit cards and walks around town wearing a "Don't be
tracked. Pay with cash" button. Even if Uber addressed every single point on
his list, he still wouldn't use them.

~~~
johnloeber
I do respect him for his unwavering commitment to his principles.

~~~
taurath
I see the value in his principles but I feel like it could use a more
marketable steward.

~~~
blhack
"More marketable" is how you end up compromising on your ideals.

Stallman is nuts, but he is an extremely important type of nuts. The world
needs more people like him.

~~~
johnloeber
On that note, can you think of more people quite like RMS? In other fields,
perhaps?

~~~
jpatokal
Plenty of political prisoners fit the bill. Here's one guy who spent 23 years
in prison in Singapore because he refused to sign a statement renouncing
violence -- not being he likes violence, but because that would have implied
he supported violence earlier:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chia_Thye_Poh](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chia_Thye_Poh)

On release into house arrest, he refused a government job because that would
have "muzzled" him. 32 years aftert his initial arrest, all restrictions were
finally lifted -- and the first thing he did was call for the abolition of the
act used to arrest him.

Also Mandela, Gandhi, etc.

------
eltondegeneres
I'm not a fan of Uber either, but there is an unofficial python client out
there.[1] If you've already made an Uber account and have issues with running
nonfree software, but not sketchy business practices, you can still use Uber
through the terminal.

[1]: [https://github.com/tals/uber.py](https://github.com/tals/uber.py)

------
dash2
One of RMS's points is that Uber exploits its drivers by paying them low
wages. I've taken several Ubers in the past month. The drivers tell me that
they get 80% of the cost of the ride. One guy said that his previous company
took 60%. I also met a student who said that he liked being able to work the
part time hours.

~~~
cjbprime
You should be more skeptical when people tell you they love their jobs while
you are paying them to perform their jobs, especially given the presence of
numerous press articles quoting many dissatisfied Uber drivers.

There's a significant chance that they are telling you they love their jobs
because if they told you they hate Uber and feel trapped by it, you would give
them a bad rating and they would get fired.

~~~
larrys
"when people tell you they love their jobs while you are paying them to
perform their jobs"

Parent comment doesn't say the drivers said "love" and the comments made don't
appear to be over the top in any way. Also you are discounting the parent
commenters ability to discern a BS answer from a real answer by interpreting
emotion. (Not saying you aren't right to be skeptical as you raised a valid
point).

~~~
smacktoward
The point is that taxi driving is a service industry, and nobody makes money
in a service job by appearing unhappy or bitter. Customers come back more
often and tip better if you seem cheerful, not if you confront them as cogs in
a system that's screwing you. We want our baristas to be Manic Pixie Dream
Girls, not overworked, underpaid people who resent our taking 15 minutes to
decide what flavor syrup we want in our latte.

The result is what David Foster Wallace, in his classic essay "A Supposedly
Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again"
([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Supposedly_Fun_Thing_I%27ll_N...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Supposedly_Fun_Thing_I%27ll_Never_Do_Again)),
called the "professional smile":

 _This is related to the phenomenon of the Professional Smile, a national
pandemic in the service industry... at banks, restaurants, airline ticket
counters, and on and on. You know this smile-the one that doesn 't quite reach
the smiler's eyes and signifies nothing more than a calculated attempt to
advance the smiler's own interests by pretending to like the smilee..._

 _Who do they think is fooled by the Professional Smile?_

 _And yet the Professional Smile 's absence now also causes despair. Anybody
who's ever bought a pack of gum in a Manhattan cigar store or asked for
something to be stamped FRAGILE at a Chicago post office or tried to obtain a
glass of water from a South Boston waitress knows well the soul-crushing
effect of a service worker's scowl, i.e. the humiliation and resentment of
being denied the Professional Smile._

~~~
stormbrew
While it's valid to question what an Uber driver says to a customer, it
doesn't necessarily follow that because some Uber drivers have come out
against it publicly that all of them are somehow in thrall to the company and
hiding their disgust, or even that their issues are actually worse than the
issues you might hear a taxi driver say about their company off the meter.
Particularly since taxi companies are almost always local and local rules
vary.

To go back to a specific point in the OP, if an Uber driver says that when
they were a taxi driver the company's cut was 40% instead of the 20% uber
takes, I'd be inclined to think they're not lying about it. Merely not
bringing it up would be more than sufficient to maintain the illusion.

And to compare this to a personal experience conversing with a cab driver and
an uber driver, I had a cabbie tell me that they wait a _month_ to get money
from debit or credit transactions in their cab from the company, and this is
one of the reasons they resist customers paying that way. An uber driver told
me it's a week for them. That's a huge difference in payment cycle.

Also, if Uber drivers are trapped somehow from taking their labour elsewhere,
it is entirely because of the regulatory capture created by the taxi
industry's relationship with city administrations that imposes inflexible
limits on the way the taxi industry can grow (often to the point of it being
essentially a planned economy).

------
chroma
Stallman isn't quite right on a few points. For example, you can summon an
Uber via SMS or a mobile site. No app or smartphone required.

But let's address the core of his argument instead of nitpicking. Yes, Uber's
behavior has been pretty unethical. They track customers and drivers. They
mine their data to figure out who had one-night stands. They shirk regulations
so they can expand quickly. But all of those points are moot for one reason:
Uber is _incredibly_ convenient.

People rarely sacrifice quality of life for their ideals. If you want to sink
Uber, the activism route is not effective. The only way to win is to make a
more compelling product. If your open source, non-tracking version is worse
than Uber, only the tiny population of die-hard idealists will use it. I don't
think RMS understands this, since he is one of the die-hard idealists.

~~~
smacktoward
_> If you want to sink Uber, the activism route is not effective._

"If you want to sink Big Tobacco, the activism route is not effective."

"If you want to sink child labor, the activism route is not effective."

"If you want to sink slavery, the activism route is not effective."

&etc.

Your fatalism is unwarranted. There's plenty of examples in history of people
making real, substantial change in society via activism.

Moreover, some problems can _only_ be solved via activism. If Uber's tracking
yields an economic advantage, and you consider that tracking to be a
moral/ethical problem, then it's a problem you can't fix with "a better
product" because a company that doesn't follow Uber's lead won't be
economically competitive. It will be leaving money on the table that Uber does
not. The only way out of the trap is for the problematic behavior to be off
limits to everybody.

~~~
chroma
RMS isn't calling for Uber to be outlawed. He's calling for a boycott. I'm
glad the problems you listed are much smaller than they used to be, but none
of them were solved with grassroots boycotts. Many of them went away due to
changes in economic conditions and an expanding moral sphere.

And I was being realistic, not fatalistic. There are countless examples of
people engaging in immoral behavior for better quality of life. Here are a
few:

\- Eating meat. It's bad for the environment, not-that-great for one's health,
and visits immense suffering upon animals. But bacon tastes good, so people
rationalize their behavior.

\- Driving a gas car. It pollutes the environment, aids immoral regimes such
as Saudi Arabia, and contributes to climate change. But again, they're so
convenient. Except for Tesla, electric cars are slow, small, and short range.
The reason Tesla is an exception is because Elon Musk recognizes that, in
order to be successful, electric cars must be better than gas cars.

\- Pirating content. Piracy deprives artists of income and violates the
principles of contract law. If you don't like the cost or terms, then don't
consume the content.

\- Not conserving resources (electricity, water, etc).

Some individuals do some of these things, but never civilization as a whole.
At the macro scale, this sort of activism is a rounding error.

------
macspoofing
>Uber requires you to identify yourself, both to order a cab and to pay.

Yeah. If you deal with money, there is no other way to build a business. Right
or wrong, you just can't anonymize financial transactions.

>Uber's clever policy of not being directly responsible for anything that goes
wrong extends to harassment by drivers, and its practice of identifying
passengers enables drivers to find out who the passenger is.

That's a good point. I don't think it would hold up in court if something were
to happen (e.g. driver robs or kills a passenger).

>Uber plans to do away with human cab drivers.

If Uber doesn't do it, somebody else will. Can't stop progress.

The privacy issues that he raises in other points are pretty good as well.

On a separate matter, though I was never a FSF zealot it pains me to see how
irrelevant the FSF and Stallman became this decade.

~~~
waterlesscloud
I make regular financial transactions all the time with people who have not
the slightest clue what my name is.

~~~
macspoofing
Cash? I'm not sure you can make an online business without disclosing some
data about yourself.

------
enoch_r
> It requires passengers to run a nonfree program (an app). As always, a
> nonfree program tramples its users' freedom.

> Uber plans to do away with human cab drivers.

> It would be easy for a non-plutocratic government to prohibit this, and
> that's what every country ought to do, unless/until every person gets an
> adequate basic income so people don't need to be employed.

Which is a bigger case of "trampling freedom": _voluntarily_ using someone's
closed-source program, or having the government tell me they'll put me in jail
if I offer to sell someone a ride in my self-driving car?

~~~
macspoofing
Good point. I'd guess Stallman would lean towards the former. His politics are
leftist/socialist/anarchocommunist.

------
arihant
A hole in RMS' line of thinking is this - he extends only one end of the
argument, the end which says Uber will massively grow. He doesn't acknowledge
the fact that there will undeniably be other competitors to Uber, a bunch of
them might end up being free software. If history has taught us anything,
somebody somewhere always tries to copy every closed source project in the
name of freedom and open source. Why does RMS think this would be any
different?

Also, he mentions only bad side of oversight. Even with such oversight, there
are rape cases, mugging and other crimes done by Uber drivers. Without
tracking, how does he propose he will solve the problem? Maybe he should
protest for no oversight when his own daughter takes a GNU/Cab. Why mock what
you don't understand? Contrary to RMS standard belief, the invisible hand in
the world is not stupid, people put up with what he calls "sins" because there
is an offsetting value they are receiving.

Uber in current world is equivalent of someone entering the room, trying to
find a light switch, not knowing what we will find. RMS' complaint is that he
is vegan and the guy finding the light bulb is wearing leather shoes.

And Uber does have competitors, and they are solving points he mentioned. In
India, Ola is one competitor that allows cash, and allows anonymous bookings
via a call centre that does not require me even telling my name. But even Ola
knows it wouldn't exist without Uber in this world.

Why shoot the guy who is trying to push the envelope?

------
birken
Or... Why you shouldn't use any ride sharing company.

Numbers 4-6 are even more broad, they basically apply to any situation where
you are required to use a credit card to pay (which identifies you), which is
basically every single app.

I'm empathetic to the issue that there is no way to anonymously take an Uber
(a real downgrade as compared to cabs), but for your average person where a
massive upgrade in convenience offsets the slight loss of anonymity, this is
going to be a tough sell.

~~~
bkor
Why compare this with ride sharing? That's not what Uber is. It doesn't matter
that Uber calls itself a ride sharing company, it is not. This has been
mentioned before: with Uber someone takes you from a place to somewhere you
specify. They drive the way that you want because you requested it from them.
Further, you pay their expenses and a bit more. Exactly like a taxi.

Ride sharing is where someone was already going somewhere and you share the
costs.

IMO you could use a ride sharing company where you're more anonymous. E.g.
public transport :-P (though not in my country :()

------
johnloeber
>Uber plans to do away with human cab drivers.

>It would be easy for a non-plutocratic government to prohibit this, and
that's what every country ought to do, unless/until every person gets an
adequate basic income so people don't need to be employed.

So what? This is the way of technology: obsolete work becomes automated.
Extending RMS' argument to its logical conclusion means reinstating many forms
of manual labor (that are now done by machines) in effort to reduce
unemployment. Do you want to plow your land with your bare hands? No! Do you
want to drive taxis? No!

There's a special point regarding driving taxis: it's one of the most
dangerous jobs currently available. Moreover, the taxi industry is infamously
exploitative of drivers, such that the competition from Uber/Lyft is actually
_raising_ taxi drivers' wages in the interim.[0]

I did not expect the logical conclusion of RMS' argument to be ludditism. I
find this surprising.

> Uber is an unregulated near-monopoly, so it can cut rates for drivers
> arbitrarily.

I think this is an unrealistic long-term view. The rideshare market has low
barriers to entry and a high potential for competition, such that I expect to
eventually see this market fragmented among many isomorphic companies (Lyft,
Uber, SideCar, etc.), perhaps more so on a local than on a global level. I've
laid out my thoughts on the issue in an essay.[1]

[0] [http://www.forbes.com/sites/timworstall/2013/12/12/how-
lyft-...](http://www.forbes.com/sites/timworstall/2013/12/12/how-lyft-and-
uber-will-raise-taxi-drivers-incomes-not-lower-them/)

[1] [http://johnloeber.com/w/uber.pdf](http://johnloeber.com/w/uber.pdf)

~~~
ThomPete
"So what?"

The way of technology is to increasingly render people obsolete. This is great
for some people for most its a threat to their ability to make a living.

The logical conclusion is not what you state but one conclusion his other is
basic income and then you can automate away all you want.

There is an unfortunate tendency to think about technology replacing jobs as
temporary until the workforce re-adjust yet the increasing reality is
structural unemployment not just temporary.

This for instance is worrying
[http://www.technologyreview.com/sites/default/files/images/d...](http://www.technologyreview.com/sites/default/files/images/destroying.jobs_.chart1x910_0.jpg)

The luddite fallacy is well known by many yet there are an increasingly
worrying trend that indicates that the fallacy is a fallacy itself.

The consequence is that as technology does what technology do, it will leave
an increasingly larger and larger group of people unable to find new jobs.

The real competitors arent china, its automation and people really dont give
it enough credit.

~~~
johnloeber
> There is an unfortunate tendency to think about technology replacing jobs as
> temporary until the workforce re-adjust yet the increasing reality is
> structural unemployment not just temporary.

Yeah, I know. The thing you're forgetting is that unemployment denotes a
percentage of the eligible workforce, which, in itself, is only a fraction of
the total population. Before the industrial revolution, literally EVERYONE,
save for infants and toddlers, had some sort of employment -- some daily task
to assist their making ends meet. The long-term trend is extremely obviously
one of monotonic decline of the number of jobs available per capita.

I'm totally aware that the consequence of technology replacing jobs is
structural unemployment. Yes, over time, there will be more unemployment. It
is likely that we will adapt for this by changing the definition of the
eligible workforce, and by supplying further social aid (e.g. basic income) to
those who are not in the workforce.

However, the problem with your argument is that you are putting the cart
before the horse: you want basic income before you remove jobs. Instituting
basic income while people still have jobs is politically well-nigh impossible.
There actually must be a felt _need_ for basic income, not just "once y'all
have basic income we can start automating away your jobs".

Would you have said, on the cusp of the industrial revolution, that nations
should hold out on the technological progress until everyone is assured a new
job and a decent quality of life? Maybe, but I think that's a bit idealistic.
Innovation -- like all forms of change -- can be a bit rough as it sweeps
through.

~~~
waterlesscloud
Honestly, I think it's useful to be talking about basic income right now so
that when the time arrives it's not a totally alien idea.

It would also be useful to have some small-scale prototypes running well in
advance to help work out wrinkles.

------
packetized
Interesting. Mr. Stallman should check with the local laws of any given
municipality regarding taxis - in some, not only can you not hail a cab on the
street, but you must also provide extensive contact information in order to
summon one via phone.

To wit, Birmingham, AL has precisely these restrictions & regulations.

------
nvader
His points start out idealistic and abstract, and full of Free Software
rhetoric. The list then turns to more concrete and specific objections,
whatever their validity may be.

Talk about burying the lede :P I think it would resonate with a larger
audience if he just flipped the order of his bullet points.

------
zhng
> It requires passengers to run a nonfree program (an app).

[https://m.uber.com/](https://m.uber.com/) doesn't require the app to be
installed.

~~~
M2Ys4U
install != run.

Using that mobile site still requires one to run non-free Javascript, which
RMS also has a problem with.

~~~
aembleton
Javascript is an interpreted language. You can view the javascript that your
machine is going to execute and step through it line by line.

Therefore it is free (as in speech) for you to inspect.

~~~
krapp
I think the problem is javascript that's not 'free' as in explicitly licensed
as free software.

The web, as a concept, seems to conflict with his ideals in a number of ways,
at least superficially. For instance, you can't modify and redistribute the
source code of any site you visit, since by definition you only get the
response of that site. Technically, every URL leads to a black box. Although
many sites use free libraries and might offer their source code as a repo, you
never really know what they're actually running.

Hacker News is a perfect example. It's only barely "open source" in that you
can download an old version of the Arc forum, and it's known that the HN staff
have made their own edits to the software, which no one can contribute to, or
fork, or even see, since they don't want people to be able to game the system.
What people are interacting with is pretty much a closed source and
proprietary service.

But on the other hand, you _interact_ with the html, and you can mess with it
in the browser all you want. Still not technically free, though.

------
vvpan
I started taking RMS much more seriously after Snowden.

------
dllthomas
_" It requires passengers to run a nonfree program (an app)."_

It looks like with Uber's API, one could potentially issue requests without
running any non-free software on your own device. If that's the case, this one
is weakened a tiny bit - though certainly I don't think there is currently a
FLO client and Uber can rightly (through this lens) be criticized for not
providing one.

------
lotsofmangos
It should be no major surprise that RMS would be against booking travel
through a proprietary computer network that is privately data-mined.

------
ryan-allen
I haven't used Uber since their 'glory ride' post or whatever it was. I'm back
to using regular taxis.

------
xbonez
> With real taxis, you can flag one on the street or phone in any fashion; you
> can pay cash; you can be anonymous.

And even with Uber around, you can still do that. No one's taken that choice
away. Use Lyft/Uber if you're comfortable with it. If not, user a regular cab.

~~~
dllthomas
Well, he makes the point later that if Uber/Lyft/etc are sufficiently
successful they could displace regular cabs. You can disagree with that point,
but it probably deserves to be addressed rather than ignored.

------
CyberDildonics
If you have a robotic job, you need to learn something less robotic to not be
replaced by a robot.

And people need to stop with the basic income ridiculousness. No one is there
yet. Giving people money doesn't mean they will better themselves with it.
Uniform high quality education and healthcare are what lifts a community of
people up. Why do schools get funding based on the taxes of the local
neighborhood? Why is even extreme emergency healthcare so privatized? Why is
it that basic financial knowledge is not taught in schools? Why is college so
expensive and the preparation for a career so poor by comparison?

There are big problems that come before basic income.

------
nadams
> Then what will you do, if you don't want to tell Big Brother where you are
> going?

Walk? Bike? Hitch a ride Back To The Future style with your hoverboard?

------
amelius
Actually, many of these arguments apply to a lot of other companies too; small
ones like AirBnB, but also big ones like Google and Apple.

------
netik
Yet another reason why working with or talking to RMS is impossible. I think
we can apply many of these arguments to Taxi cabs as well.

Taxis run "non free" software to process credit cards.

Taxi destinations can be subpoenaed by local LEO and the government, along
with credit card receipts, just like Uber.

Taxis are a regulated market, but the medallion market is largel unregulated
and a near-monopoly.

Taxi drivers complain they are underpaid and beholden to the medallion owners.

And so on...

~~~
nhaehnle
RMS has an extreme stance, but it's actually quite refreshing that he just
puts it out there in an easily digestable form.

 _Taxis run "non free" software to process credit cards._

And I think RMS cares less about that. No doubt he will be unhappy about the
taxi driver's/company's choice to run non-free software; however, regular taxi
companies are willing to do business with free software users - Uber refuses
to do so. That's a pretty significant difference.

 _Taxi destinations can be subpoenaed by local LEO and the government, along
with credit card receipts, just like Uber._

Taxis can be paid in cash, unlike Uber.

The medallion issues are oddities of a few (not even all!) cities particularly
in the US. You are right to complain about them as that system is ridiculous;
however, the comparison with Uber is unfair because Uber is trying to take
over the world.

~~~
netik
I worked for Stallman in the 90's. Given the choice, he will walk miles versus
using a credit card.

> Taxis can be paid in cash, unlike Uber.

Ah, so soon you forget that Taxis must legally record pick up and drop off
points for the police department and their drivers can be questioned by LEO.

~~~
dllthomas
You're saying there's no difference between reporting (pick up location, drop
off location) and reporting (pick up location, drop off location, identity)?

------
gregthompsonjr
Richard Stallman is engineering's smartest conspiracy theorist in the world.
He's great at his sport, but getting to his level of expertise has clearly
taken a toll on his ability to distinguish paranoia from reality. The tinfoil
is doing something... The whole post is both objectionable and somewhat
warranted/understandable at the same time.

~~~
alecco
Yeah, only he was right about spying and tracking by government. In fact, his
"conspiracy" theories fell quite short to the brutal reality of AT&T,
Wikileaks, and Snowden revelations.

------
em3rgent0rdr
A free software coder needs to develop a p2p distributed ride-sharing
server+client system.

------
lziz
> It requires passengers to run a nonfree program (an app). As always, a
> nonfree program tramples its users' freedom

Off to a great start persuading the everyman once again, Stallman

Agreed on the more salient point of the pervasive record-keeping and the
government have full access to them, though. Shoulda lead with that.

------
don_draper
Uber is super easy to use and it helps prevent DUI's. nuff said

------
fiatjaf
You may not consider it, but

> Uber also records where you get the cab and where you go with it. The US
> government can get those records, and any lawsuit (such as a divorce
> lawsuit) can subpoena them.

Is a serious thing.

------
colund
I find it interesting that he thinks anonymous taxi travelling is important
and that sexual services should be legal.

------
diminoten
Modern taxis fail every one of these "tests", so the fact that RMS wouldn't
use Uber but would continue to use taxis at all is merely RMS riding a hatred
bandwagon in an effort to stay relevant.

Fortunately for us, he hasn't said anything remotely new, so we can continue
to think of him as the 20th century man he is.

~~~
lambda
Uh, no.

You can hail a taxi by hand, and pay with cash, and no one will have your
information in a database that can be used against you later.

While I don't agree with all of his reasoning here, he is correct that taxis
offer you substantially more privacy than Uber, and Uber has been known to
abuse the data they collect on passengers in several instances, so it's far
more than just a theoretical concern.

~~~
diminoten
> You can hail a taxi by hand, and pay with cash, and no one will have your
> information in a database that can be used against you later.

No you can't. _Plenty_ of taxis record the backseats of their cars, and you
have no way of knowing which do/don't.

Taxis don't offer you enough privacy over Uber, and the reason he's coming
after Uber is because he wants to stay relevant, not because Uber is
particularly bad.

~~~
jpatokal
But if you pay by cash, there's no easy way to match that recording to you.

Also, I'm pretty sure RMS doesn't give a fig about "relevance". He's just
applying his principles to the world as he sees it, and he's been doing this
literally for decades:

[https://stallman.org/~rms/archives/index.html](https://stallman.org/~rms/archives/index.html)

------
sighsigh
"until every person gets an adequate basic income so people don't need to be
employed."

Hand-waving pleb magnets like this (the statement, not the person stating)
show a painfully inept understanding of how autonomous labor is going to work.

Once Moore's Law crosses the processing power/price ratios where robots can
perform "good enough" object acquisition and manipulation, (pre-Singularity
phase) no nation on earth can deflate their currency fast enough to stop
charlatans from promoting wholesale human elimination instead of inflationary
appeasement.

Meaning, after the "good enough" threshold is crossed, nations will engage in
inflationary policies to bide time while desperately seeking a clearing price
for human labor. But they won't find it for most labor because of two factors:

1.) At the most efficient time usage (under politically impossible
configurations and assuming equal productivity), in which people work 18 hour
days forever and utilize 6 hours of sleep, 1 machine's labor equals 1.25
human's labor. Typically, 1 machine's labor equals 3 human's labor. Accounting
for productivity enhancement, the comparison will be about as worthwhile to
make as comparing engines to horses today. (My drone is 500 plebpower?)

2.) It takes 12 years (again, under politically impossible standards) and
~18,000 pounds of food to make a human productive. It takes a drone a few
weeks to be born out of a few gallons of fuel, and a few pounds of materials.

The real cost of labor is staggering. And if you think people are stupid
enough to fall for the trap (again) to use the productive gains of a new
technology to do nothing more than cycle it all back into a mechanism to breed
more humans into existence, I think you will be in for a rude awakening when
human costs drop so low from endless inflation appeasement that using said
drones to harvest these surplus humans for their physical materials becomes
wildly profitable. And if the charlatans can make even HackerNews believe
North Korea was behind the Sony hacks and clamor for invasion, just imagine
how easy it will be to manufacture some social justice narrative for mining
populations centers for biomaterials. ("Those evil sexists need to be mined!
For great equality!")

TL;DR: Once the price of human labor drops to sub-zero levels due to political
appeasement via inflation to counter "good-enough" drones, it will be more
profitable to crush human organization than promote it.

~~~
droopyEyelids
Very cool vision of the future. I'm trying to imagine more consequences of the
price of human labor going negative.

After we free up the surplus material making the humans, there will be far
less need for many robot-provided services.

Farming won't be as big of a deal anymore. Many of our modern industries will
shrink dramatically. We won't need food, clothing, entertainment, or medical
services.

We can expect to keep a contingent of engineers around to service and design
the robots until they hit the self-repairing, self-designing level of the
singularity recursion.

It seems like a more-or-less plausible jumping off point into a runaway-AI
future.

------
stefantalpalaru
I was following the arguments until I came across the one where the company is
to blame because some customers are afraid of being harassed by drivers with
the conclusion: "this problem comes directly out of the practices listed above
that mistreat all users of Uber".

No it doesn't. It's a _non sequitur_.

------
utternerd
I couldn't even make it through this entire article, almost like it was
satire, yet sadly it wasn't.

------
enjo
That's all well and good. Except that I still need to get around, and Uber
(and it's competitors) remains better than my local cab system. That's true of
basically every city I've ever visited as well.

Until that is no longer true, I'll continue to be an extremely satisfied Uber
user.

~~~
eps
Comfort/convenience vs principles/ethics. To each his own.

~~~
larrys
Actually all of this is almost certainly something like "where I draw the line
is the right line anyone who does less has failed anyone who has done more is
taking it to far".

As someone else is this thread has mentioned, RMS addressed the issue of Uber
wanting to put drivers out of jobs as bad but ironically the comment pointed
out that the "free software movement itself, are responsible for the non-
existence of numerous jobs."

------
kevining
> It requires passengers to run a nonfree program (an app).

I'm not sure if I agree with this, unless you consider the web to be non-free.
Uber also runs a really great mobile website[1], which is one of the few
reasons I use Uber not owning an iPhone or Android device.

[1] [https://m.uber.com/](https://m.uber.com/)

~~~
chippy
Can you book Uber cars using their website on your desktop?

~~~
onedev
Yes you can. I've done it when my phone was dead and I had forgotten my
charging cable at work.

~~~
macspoofing
Simply running a web-app on desktop wouldn't satisfy Stallman. He'd want the
entire stack to be open-source (front-end and back-end code).

------
mb0
Couldn't it also be argued that the GNU limits user freedom by requiring users
never use non-free software?

~~~
steven777400
No, because GNU licenses place no limitation on the use of the software, only
on how it is distributed and combined with other software.

That's why it's ok to run a non-free program on top of Linux or install a non-
free driver, etc.

