Uber’s reply to the new laws.
Ride-hailing company Uber is slamming the British Columbia government’s decision to impose minimum wages and basic labour protections for gig workers,
Uber can get fucked.
If you can’t figure out how to pay your workers properly, and follow the law on “basic labour protections”, you don’t deserve to be in business.
I pride myself that I have never called or used any uber service. They can get fucked. also never book with airbnb, or whatever weird delivery service that expect their “worker” to get paid with tips only. I only order delivery when the restaurant have their own guy doing it.
Big business is full of entitled babies. The minimum wage needs to be $21
Tie minimum wage to general CoL since 1980, and it currently would be something like $28/hr.
Tie minimum wage to a specific CoL such as rental costs, which are governed by the one-third rule, and since 1980 it would have risen to about $38/hr in cities like Kelowna, and likely half again more for places like Vancouver.
Then uber’s business model is untenable
Uber’s goal was always to replace human drivers with autonomous vehicles, it’s just taking longer than they planned.
You’re not wrong. They’re a tech that will take a decade or two longer than expected to reach maturity, but they will get there eventually.
Uber’s CEO makes 24 million a year to sit in air-conditioned comfort and make bad, self-serving decisions.
I’d love to see what the new rates are compared to Taxis, we’ll have to wait until September, but I suspect it’s not going to be much of a difference anymore and usage of these services will drop.
It does seem a bit strange that the BC government just recently banned self-driving cars though.
I expected that to be the path forward here, with Vancouver being the first city in Canada to roll out a Waymo-taxi operation. Most of the cost of a taxi/uber these days is labour, not the capital for the vehicle or maintenance and fuel.
Fully autonomous self driving cars just aren’t ready. They probably never will be unless you give them a dedicated lane and grade separate it. But we already have that, it’s called Skytrain.
The way forward is a properly funded transit system not a techbro feverdream.
Waymo has millions of completely driverless miles in multiple cities providing publicly available taxi services at this point, They expanded to Los Angeles already this year and are still planning on operating in Austin by the end of the year too.
It’s clearly viable, and it’s just a matter of time at this point as they polish the rough edges and learn how to scale it better.
Isn’t Waymo famously reliant on having nearly as many remote operators as the have vehicles when they first had to disclose the number, and have outright refused to reveal it more recently?
Waymo has millions of completely driverless miles in multiple cities providing publicly available taxi services at this point,
I’ll wait until the first snowfall that thoroughly covers street markings, and enjoy the chaos that results.
There isn’t a single driverless tech out there that can handle snow of any amount, much less a Canadian winter where markings vanish under a cm or two of compressed snow and ice.
Notice where those self driving cars actually deploy to? Notice something about their climate? Also there not fully autonomous there are humans helping them.
