What incentive do taxi companies have under existing regulations to make the lives of passengers any better? They have been granted A monopoly by the government and passengers will have to take them however bad they are because no competition is allowed.
I don't know about where you live, but where I live (London) the black cabs face competition from dozens of minicab companies everywhere, and most of them have apps, and there are aggregatd services. The only thing the black cabs have a monopoly on is picking up people off the street without a booking or from taxi stands; but given that in most cities here a minicab company is a few minutes walk away, and usually having one come to you will take minutes, I use minicabs more often than I use black cabs.
That said, the service I get from black taxis is routinely better.
As for other incentives: They get dictated improvements and failing to make the required changes will cost them their license.
Drivers are adults. They can stop driving for Uber any moment that wish. Or do you think that adults don't know whats good for themselves and government needs to tell them what to do?
I think Uber entices people to break the law when drivers would have not otherwise have engaged or even considered engaging in that activity.
And no I don't think drivers are always aware and no i don't expect them to do legal research on a city, county and national level to determine whether being an Uber driver is unlawful. As a mater of fact I don't expect any employee/contractor to have the burden of performing legal research if their job duties are lawful because it is unlawful for any employer(Uber) to enter into contracts with employees/contractors (drivers) to perform illegal acts. So in short no I don't drivers know what's best for themselves when they break the law to work for Uber for a few bucks per legal violation, much less the real cost of getting a criminal record and losing their Uber job.
And yes I think governments are needed to pass laws that carry penalties, generally I think that's called civilized society, how long do you think you would last in a world without laws.
Even adults are not omniscient, nor without pressures that come from having to feed and house themselves and their families. All of those constraints are exploited by various businesses in a systemic way. Employment is very often not a fully voluntary trade.
<quote>You know the rest of the world isn't as racist as the USA</quote>
Unless perhaps, you are a Turk in Germany or a Roma just about anywhere in Europe.
A reasonable point. I'd say the US is worse in absolute terms (simply on account of a much larger number of number of fatal shootings and the like), but whether that means it's more racist or similarly so and just more violent in general is tricky to analyze. It's unfortunate that we find ourselves having to make such comparisons at all :-(
Everywhere in the 60s or everywhere in pre-Uber XXI century? Honest question; I was under the impression that most of the racism problems in the US have been solved before I was born.
Racism in the US is not currently solved, so your impression is incorrect. Slavery is gone, and legal segregation is gone, but racism is still alive and well.
While the other comment is particularly snarky, and while modern day racism is less overt than activities like lynching, it still exists.
As an easy example from recent news, a Texas judge posting on facebook that it was "time for a tree and a rope" (which is an implied lynching)[0].
There are more ways to make it transparent than exposing anti-spam secrets and here is few random ideas. First of all there is already CA system and there no reason why there couldn't be system where you pay for signing certificate to make sure your mail is always delivered as long as certificate reputation remain high. Imperfect, yet that would be much more reliable than current lottery system.
Another way to improve situation is to get rid of shady black lists BS like Spamhaus and replace them with proper organizations. Google could also create some consortium to improve protocols, implement easy to use mail servers that send everything properly out-of-box, then enforce DKIM usage, etc.
But no, Google need nothing of it because they have huge market share and directly benefit when non-Gmail services become unreliable.
