It reads like the real problem was that the other developers fell into what developers seem to love more than anything: Pedantry. Instead of playing along with the false praise, they set out to prove the claim in the email wrong.

Where are these companies where I can tell my boss "Hey, Mike is a good programmer and he just applied. Just give him the job without interviewing! Or accelerate him through the process!" I suppose if it were a two person startup where it was me and my boss you could do that, but at a normal 1000 person CRUD shop with dedicated HR machinery? No way.

1. I was applying for a job at Company A and I had a former co-worker working there. I think it was down to me and 2 other people and the manager asked my former co-worker about me and I believe his feedback tipped the scales in my favor.

2. Same situation as above but in this case it was my feedback. A different former co-worker was applying for a job at Company A(now that I was working there) and the manager hiring asked both me and my former and now present co-worker about the candidate as it was between him and another person.

3. A former manager straight up offered me a position at his new job because I'd be a good fit for the role as they were building exactly what I had done before. I turned him down(nicely) as I had stepped away from that particular type of work.

4. I've given negative feedback on a candidate that I'd worked with that was interviewing for an open role but it wasn't just me. All 3 of us including co-workers from (1) and (2) above had previously worked with the candidate and we didn't think he'd be a good fit for our org but it was ultimately up the manager of the team that was hiring to make the decision.

Granted I'm at a smaller company but these "network placed" jobs do happen. Sometimes it's just tipping the scales and sometimes it's a straight up job and sometimes it could be the reason you didn't get the job.

Nobody is getting jobs without any interviews, but people are absolutely getting interviewed before/without a job listing, or starting the initial screen with recruiter/hiring manager with an upper hand of “Mike said you’re good to work with”. Even at a 1000 person company with HR.

Same here, also =~ 25 years (working as a professional programmer since 2001). I never had a problem finding a job myself (either switching jobs or being laid off, it happens) but it was always "cold calling", apply on a job board / Linked In and go through the interview without any referral or inside help.

And when I tried to refer someone, they were blissfully ignored. Even had managers / HR go after me: "we need someone ASAP, don't you have some referrals?". Reached my acquaintances among former workmates, convinced them to make a personalized CV so I can send it to HR, nothing happened next. They didn't even call the guy, completely "forget about it".

So I learned my lesson of corporate helplessness and don't give a fuck anymore. Don't recommend anyone, don't care if HR or managers need someone urgently, I do my job and don't get involved with anyone else anymore.

Got a new job through a LinkedIn ad, found a former co-worker here.

I mean, it could be that I'm not a great networking person, but.. I'll agree that network hasn't helped me much so far.

You're going to need to pitch your buddies a lot more aggressively than that.

You've worked closely with Mike in the past at ExampleCorp, where he was one of the team's top contributors. He was great at code reviewing, a calm and reliable voice during production incidents, and always ready to help out new graduates. Mike was the guy people turned to with their most difficult WidgetStack bugs, fixing problems that had stumped other developers. He would be a great asset to the company, and a great fit for this role - which you note needs WidgetStack. He has your strongest possible recommendation.

The thing is - the pitch also has to be true.

I've never worked in a company so large that I couldn't go a step further and actually talk to the hiring manager and tell them they would be stupid not to take someone's resume seriously. But it's more about fast tracking the interview than skipping it. No one is just going to blindly hire referrals. They shouldn't anyway.

Not one of your former managers that like you has gone on to high-level positions?

Contrast that to how individuals get the hammer put down on them by the justice system if they so much as fart in the wrong room. The lesson from the last 50 years should be: If you want to commit a crime and get away with it, do it as a corporation.

Ubers behavior during its growth phase, and even now is a good example of this. The latest letter of the law vs spirit of the law thing Uber did was circumvent the NYC law to try and ensure Uber drivers get a fair minimum wage.

To avoid having to pay any difference to make up the hourly wage to drivers, Uber runs an algorithm which kicks drivers out of the app randomly if demand gets too low, without warning or indication of when they can get back in. It can be minutes or hours. So the drivers remain on the road, driving/idling, waiting to get back into the app. The "work" is still getting done, but it doesn't count against Uber.

Imagine a small restaurant doing similar, deciding at random slow times instead of sending staff home for the day, they assign them no tables and mark them as off-the-clock. When demand picks up again, they get assigned some tables and resume making money.

The whole independent contractor on-demand app market is an automated exploitation engine.

I get legislators want uber drivers to earn a living wage, but expecting uber to continue allowing unlimited amount of drivers to be "online", when they have to pay for them is absurd.

>Imagine a small restaurant doing similar, deciding at random slow times instead of sending staff home for the day, they assign them no tables and mark them as off-the-clock. When demand picks up again, they get assigned some tables and resume making money.

You're trying to imply small businesses don't do this but this happens all the time. It's not even limited to minimum wage laws. After the ACA was passed, everyone started avoiding hiring people for more than 32 hours if they could, to skirt the "you have to provide healthcare to all full time employees" requirement.

Restaurants/retail will reduce staffing due to demand, but they don't leave people hanging by an on-call thread the way this automated Uber model did. Tends to be more like cutting shifts off early or calling people not to come in. It is not this automated app-driven robo labor optimization. People aren't being told to go outside and maybe they'll get called back in 5 minutes, 1 hour, or 1 day.

Agreed a lot of businesses moved people to 32 hour weeks to avoid ACA, which is a different issue.. how's all the on-demand faux contractor workforces healthcare though?

Most of those drivers were presumably enrolled before that legislation was passed/came into force. Blaming uber for having those drivers seems like a stretch.

> They could have also kicked people out for full days, rest of shift, or given an indicator of when they may try again. Something that leaves it more clear they are off and don't linger around to try and get back in.

Is this a real concern? This seems like something that sucks for the first few days and then everyone realizes what's the new normal and adapts accordingly. I don't doubt uber could have done better here, but characterizing poor UI as "circumvent the NYC law to try and ensure Uber drivers get a fair minimum wage" is a stretch. It's also unclear how uber benefits from drivers being frustrated at the UI.

>Restaurants/retail will reduce staffing due to demand, but they don't leave people hanging by an on-call thread the way this automated Uber model did.

Uber driver are not "on call". They can sign off at any time. Sure, they might need the money, but in that respect I don't see how that's any different than 0 hour contracts that some restaurants have.

>Agreed a lot of businesses moved people to 32 hour weeks to avoid ACA, which is a different issue.. how's all the on-demand faux contractor workforces healthcare though?

The point isn't that being an uber driver is a dream job, it's that contrary to your rhetoric of "Imagine a small restaurant doing similar", small restaurants indeed will do something similar, if given the chance.

Honestly, that's _exactly_ what it looks like to me. Law makes it so that they have to pay drivers that are available to drive but aren't actively involved in a fair... so they change the system so that, if they don't have fairs for you you're not considered available to drive. Everything about that reeks of trying to circumvent the law.

Now, I don't know that there _is_ a better solution that works with their business model; but the answer to that isn't "cheat", it's "your business model it's sustainable".

You effectively have two options. Option one, Uber signs up as many drivers as they have customers during off-peak hours and then if you want to drive only during peak hours to take advantage of surge pricing you can't and if you want a ride then there won't be enough drivers, because they won't sign up any more if they'd have to pay someone for 8 hours to have them only drive for one. Option two, there are that many full-time drivers and then they sign up some additional part-time drivers to satisfy peak demand, but the part-time drivers are part-time and they're not getting paid during off-peak hours.

Which one do you want? Notice that there is no one better off under the first option; the people who don't want to work part-time still have the option not to under the second option, the first just prevents them from doing it even if they want to.

And if you _can't_ find a solution that allows you to pay everyone minimum wage, then you don't get to do business. I can think of plenty of businesses I could set up that would make me money and allow me to pay the people that work for me below minimum wage. But, see, we don't allow that; and we created a minimum wage law to make it very clear that we don't allow that.

Not every business model is viable given the rules society has setup (to protext society as a whole)

This is just a rehash of Option 1. The point of surge pricing is to get more drivers to drive during peak times. If you're instead using that money to pay other people to be idle then the average driver makes less money because part of what would have been their compensation is now going to pay someone else to sit around idle, and they lose the ability to make a higher hourly rate by working only during peak demand. Which in turn reduces the number of drivers available during surge pricing and there goes your funding source for hiring more drivers, so you're back to laying off lots of drivers who would otherwise have part-time work, but now also reducing the median driver's hourly rate.

> Not every business model is viable given the rules society has setup (to protext society as a whole)

Minimum wage laws in general have never protected anyone. If there is another job available to you that pays more than minimum wage and is otherwise on equally favorable terms, you would have taken that one regardless of whether a lower paying job is available. If the lower paying job is better, e.g. because it pays slightly less but you also have lower costs in terms of commuting distance or greater flexibility in hours etc., taking away that option "for your own protection" is patronizing BS.

This is why minimum wages are set at the level that only ~1% of people make minimum wage, because it minimizes the damage done by the law while still allowing opportunistic politicians to claim they've done something. Actually doing something is creating opportunities for people that have better conditions or pay higher wages so that it doesn't matter if someone is offering low wages because people aren't desperate to accept them for lack of alternatives.

Notice also that taking away alternatives can do more than just force you to take a worse one. It can make the worse alternative worse. Suppose there is a job with low pay but it's across the street from where you live, and another one with an hour commute each way, costing you $40 and two hours/day. You take the first one unless the second one pays significantly better, at least several dollars/hour more to compensate you for the gas and the time. Unless the first one is banned and goes away because it was $1/hour below the "minimum". Then not only are you stuck with the second one, they can lower their pay to the minimum when they would otherwise have had to pay more to compensate for the commute because you no longer have an alternative.

Price controls are bad.

That "if" there is doing a lot of work. I think you underestimate how many people out there are in a situation where it's the job they have or the street. Not everyone has the option to just go pick another job, and the people that don't is heavily skewed towards the people with the worst jobs.

Alternatively option two with an explicit, upfront decisions who is actually part-time, so there are no surprises and the rules are known.

That only works when the difference in demand between peak and off-peak is small relative to the cost of idle workers. In this case it isn't.

> Alternatively option two with an explicit, upfront decisions who is actually part-time, so there are no surprises and the rules are known.

Then you'll be objecting that the majority of people are classified as part-time because there will be a lot of people who get 40 hours some weeks and zero other weeks due to changes in seasonal demand etc.

Also, the result of that would be that in the slower weeks, one person gets 40 hours and one person gets 10 instead of each person getting 25 hours, and that's obviously not to the advantage of the person whose hours you're cutting. Which in turn implies that the person getting 40 will be signing up for some fresh hell like "you get 40 hours but we choose when they are" and then they're both getting screwed by the change.

If these are the upfront conditions, why is that an issue?

But the main issue you're getting closer and closer to is: uber's model doesn't seem to be profitable if they have to pay and employ with reasonable conditions. They don't have to be profitable though. We really can let them fail. The reasonable cities can then provide standard overprovisioned public transport.

Because they might have both preferred 25 hours with flexibility to a forced choice between 40 inflexible hours or 10 flexible ones.

> uber's model doesn't seem to be profitable if they have to pay and employ with reasonable conditions.

Uber is an app. Their primary cost is paying drivers. They're not going to fail because you imposed this inflexibility on them. What's going to happen is they're going to have fewer drivers and provide less service. But "have fewer drivers" is those people losing their jobs, which isn't really helping them out.

Laws that regulate how people can be treated by employers have always been a balance between _some_ people having it worse (ex, their jobs not being available) so that the _vast_ majority of people have it better.

The same things is true of things like safety regulations. It costs more to be safe, and you have to charge more or hire less if you're going to have them. But overall, society is better for them (even though some people no longer have jobs).

That's not an option though. The option uber gives is "maybe 25, maybe not, you'll find out on the day".

That's still "how do we keep uber in business". There are alternatives like good quality overprovisioned public transport which can take most of those customers. It can also deal with peak situations like events.

It's a sunk cost fallacy to think of uber as some kind of last resort employer that can ignore the rules.

It's 25 when it's 25. Which you can still have a preference for when the alternative is 10, or the alternative is "40 hours but your hours are 9PM to 1AM and then 5AM to 9AM".

> That's still "how do we keep uber in business".

Uber is still in business when they require you to work split shifts in the wee hours. We're trying to save drivers and riders from the consequences of foolish rules.

> There are alternatives like good quality overprovisioned public transport which can take most of those customers.

Overprovisioned public transport is just Uber with lower efficiency. You have a municipal bus with zero or one passengers instead of a smaller private car with one passenger or avoid the trip because you know before you start that no one is going there.

> It can also deal with peak situations like events.

Ten thousand people exit the stadium at the same time and each want to go to a different destination, thousands of which are single family homes in the suburbs.

> It's a sunk cost fallacy to think of uber as some kind of last resort employer that can ignore the rules.

The assumption is that Uber is bad, but Uber is better than taxi medallion cartels or private cars that then have to be parked in the city instead of picking up a different fare going in the opposite direction.

Uber is _different_ than the taxi system. Not all taxi systems are "taxi medallion cartels", even in cities with taxi medallions. And, when it started, Uber was worse than the taxis in a lot of cities in many ways. It's gotten better since then, but pretty much exclusively to try to prevent the cities from throwing them out on their asses.

How is this any different than minimum wage laws which are ostensibly enacted to increase worker's salaries, but businesses respond by hiring people for fewer hours? I agree that uber is thwarting legislators' attempt to improve the earnings of uber drivers, but this was the outcome everyone has foresaw, including the legislators. Characterizing it as some cunning chicanery on uber's part is absurd.

Nobody is hiring more people to counter the laws "to increase worker's salaries", they're hiring fewer workers to counter the laws that require certain benefits (health insurance) for full time workers. That's a totally different issue.

It seems perfectly predictable that a loophole you actively exploit will be closed off. Don't build your business model around loopholes, or be prepared to face the consequences.

Why? All Uber cares about are the fees it collects, which are dependent on the total number of miles and total number of rides. It has no reason to care if its drivers make minimum wage or not, unless it can be shown that if they cannot, Uber will not have enough drivers. Fortunately for Uber, there is no evidence that this is the case.

Is the question "are we breaking any laws" not a reason to care?

The number of drivers needed at any given time is completely variable. It's obviously a larger number during peak travel periods.

Suppose number of drivers needed off-peak is 100 and the number needed at the peak is 500 and they have 300 drivers. They need to sign up another 200 drivers to satisfy the peak demand, but they already have 200 more than they can use off-peak. What would you have them do? They effectively need a large proportion of the drivers to be working part time specifically during peak hours.

Moreover, there are many people willing to do that. They're not sitting in their cars idling, they're at home doing chores or other contract work and they only get in their car if the app tells them they can get paid. This is not a problem for the people who are satisfied with it, and why are the people who are unsatisfied with it even doing it? If you don't like driving for Uber, don't do it.

That's variable based upon time of day, not completely variable. It is not a new problem either. Take public transit: drivers may hate split shifts, yet they are given well defined shifts that they are paid for.

On top of that, a company that operates through an app ought to have the ability to develop software to relatively reliably predict demand.

> Moreover, there are many people willing to do that.

Willing, or desperate? For example: relatively few people want to be on-call replacement workers. They either do it because they need the money or they do it because they are hoping to get their foot in the door. Those who do it willingly are typically doing so for extra cash and because they don't have any other obligations (e.g. retirees in some fields). Now imagine that an entire company is based upon the concept of replacement workers. That puts Uber closer to the exploitive end of the spectrum than the opportunity end.

It's completely variable. If there is a major sporting event in your city, the demand is going to be much different than it is at the same time of day when there isn't a major sporting event. Demand is affected by weather, public transit disruptions, current events etc. It's not just time of day.

> Take public transit: drivers may hate split shifts, yet they are given well defined shifts that they are paid for.

Public transit has internal buffers that absorb demand. You have a bus which seats 40 but typically has 7 passengers. If there is a demand spike, this time you have 35 passengers, but this is still less than 40 so you don't need any more drivers. If that happens with Uber, they suddenly need five times as many drivers.

> On top of that, a company that operates through an app ought to have the ability to develop software to relatively reliably predict demand.

They could certainly predict part of the demand, but then what? You don't know ahead of time what time of day it's going to rain and cause a ton of people who usually ride a bike to want a ride. There is still a high amount of unpredictable variability in the demand.

> Willing, or desperate? For example: relatively few people want to be on-call replacement workers. They either do it because they need the money or they do it because they are hoping to get their foot in the door.

Let's consider these people then. Their options are to have no job and likely run into serious financial difficulties, take the on-call job to cover some bills while they look for a better job, or take some even worse job than the on-call job, but that might not be worse in a way that has been legislated against, e.g. because it's two hours away and there is no law against having a four hour round trip commute.

The only reason they'd take the on-call job is if their other options are worse. But if their other options are worse then taking away the on-call job option isn't helping them. To actually help them you need to give them some options that are better, in which case you still don't have to prohibit the on-call job because then they'd just choose the better alternative once it's available.

> Those who do it willingly are typically doing so for extra cash and because they don't have any other obligations (e.g. retirees in some fields).

Then why shouldn't those people be able to do it, and get the extra cash?

> Now imagine that an entire company is based upon the concept of replacement workers.

Suppose Uber was part of Costco but otherwise operated in an identical way. Is that supposed to make any difference?

That's Uber's business problem to solve, though, not ours.

Sucks to be them. The solution isn't "well, let's make it easier for Uber and screw over their not-employees".

The government, the people, are not obligated to ensure profitability is possible for every corporations every idea.

The solution is going to be dictated by economics, not magic. There is no option where they convert all of the part-time drivers to full-time without any increase in the demand for rides.

What they're trying to do is avoid cutting off the part-time drivers entirely. But stop trying to force them to do that, it doesn't actually help people.

I don't expect them all to be converted to FTEs. But this unavailability BS is just that, BS.

"You are unable to log in because we have enough drivers to meet anticipated demand." Simple. Not log in, and then do a job or two then "oops, you've been randomly selected to be unable to earn money for the next hour".

Because if you're just at home, car centered infrastructure while expensive, inefficient, and dangerous, does function. But then, if you leave home on a business trip or a vacation... the problems become quite apparent quite quickly.

And you're completely correct here diagnosing the problem:

> Suppose number of drivers needed off-peak is 100 and the number needed at the peak is 500 and they have 300 drivers. They need to sign up another 200 drivers to satisfy the peak demand, but they already have 200 more than they can use off-peak. What would you have them do? They effectively need a large proportion of the drivers to be working part time specifically during peak hours.

Where I disagree is that there's a car-based answer to this, because restricting ourselves to working within the bounds of the car has caused the damn problem: because you need X number of cars with X number of drivers available to move Y number of people at Z time of day, and all three of these are going to change with availability in unpredictable ways. Whereas just... good mass transit could move all of those people, with less fuel, FAR less vehicles, and while those journeys would all probably take a bit longer even in ideal conditions, they would be safer, our air would be cleaner, and you wouldn't even need a taxi company or an app that pays people slave wages to take you places.

Moreover, even if you build more multi-family housing and mass transit, you're still not changing the nature of the issue, only the scale. There will never be 100% mass transit use because there will always be higher and lower population density areas and some proportion of people living in the latter. Then the people who live outside the reach of mass transit may want to come inside it from time to time, and you'll still have car service for that, and still have peak and off peak, and still have to answer the same questions even if there are only a third as many people doing it.

I don't recall anyone demanding that. Maybe things have changed since then, but back when I worked in restaurants if things were slow I'd be sent home and know when I was expected to be back be that the next day or in time for the dinner rush. I wasn't randomly clocked off for 15-30 minutes, and expected to hang around, then suddenly told I'm back on. In fact we'd call that wage theft, (which is very common in the US). But suddenly for Uber such a thing is acceptable.

That's seemingly what OP was demanding, given the displeasure he was expressing at uber for the practice.

>but back when I worked in restaurants if things were slow I'd be sent home and know when I was expected to be back be that the next day or in time for the dinner rush. I wasn't randomly clocked off for 15-30 minutes, and expected to hang around, then suddenly told I'm back on. In fact we'd call that wage theft, (which is very common in the US). But suddenly for Uber such a thing is acceptable.

It's the difference between employment vs working as a contractor. Cab drivers, who also work as independent contractors. No fare, no pay.

>The tight margins of the hack trade can leave cabbies feeling frustrated. “Sometimes, I don’t like it, because I have the potential to lose money,” said M. D. Islam, a cabby from Queens who has been driving for six months. He often earns less than $100 a day, he said; if his cab breaks down, or he can’t find passengers, he may end up in the red.

https://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/23/nyregion/new-york-taxi-dr...

From the OP

> Uber runs an algorithm which kicks drivers out of the app randomly if demand gets too low, without warning or indication of when they can get back in. It can be minutes or hours.

I think the OP makes it very clear that the issue is the lack of communication especially around when they can work next, not that Uber isn't willing to maintain a surge staff during minimal demand.

"When they can work next" is entirely dependent on supply and demand. Also, it seems like he was more upset about drivers having to wait around while not getting paid, than having to periodically check the app. From the OP:

>To avoid having to pay any difference to make up the hourly wage to drivers, Uber runs an algorithm which kicks drivers out of the app randomly if demand gets too low, without warning or indication of when they can get back in. It can be minutes or hours. So the drivers remain on the road, driving/idling, waiting to get back into the app. The "work" is still getting done, but it doesn't count against Uber.

In a later comment he also lamented about how uber was "leave [drivers] hanging by an on-call thread". I doubt that if uber added push notifications for slots becoming available, that OP would be even slightly placated. The issue is that there's more willing drivers than active "slots" available, since such slots uber have to pay for. As a result, there's still going to be people waiting around for a chance to make money, while being unpaid. Adding push notifications only means people don't have to check their phones every 5-10 minutes for a slot, but they're still forced to wait around unpaid.

Are you really going to try to make the case that a company the size of Uber finds the demand in NEW YORK, of all places, unpredictable? That speaks more to incompetence on Uber's part than any unrealistic expectations elsewhere. Especially since restaurants have managed to operate in far more unpredictable conditions for all of human history.

> Also, it seems like he was more upset about drivers having to wait around while not getting paid.

Right, yeah. If they said hey, we don't need you for the next four hours, drivers don't have to wait around. If they say it'll be 15 minutes, drivers know to wait around. Instead, they conveniently tell them nothing, effectively keeping them on-call. A bit of communication fixes that.

That's absolutely NOT the difference between employment and contracting. The general expectation from the IRS is that if you are setting someone's hours (and Uber is, the driver chooses to be available, but within that availability window, Uber can arbitrarily define them as unavailable), then they are an employee.

Contractors don't just hang around your job site because you tell them you don't have work for them now but "stick around 5 minutes or 2 hours, we might have some then".

Amazon similarly abuses on-demand contractors and we see this for example in the little popup trailer parks in their distribution center parking lots during holiday crush...

I get it, as a consumer these are nice services to have - but it doesn't mean we have to be OK with these labor conditions. Further, from a self interested point of view, its a slippery slope to Amazon & the rest figuring out how to do the same to their SWEs over time.

This is basically the result of new york's legislation. In jurisdictions without such legislation, uber doesn't cap the amount of drivers that can be online. Moreover "availability" in this context is entirely arbitrary. The amount of fares available is still the same. The only difference is that uber caps the amount of people that can be online because new york puts them on the hook if anyone is "available" but doesn't make minimum wage. This was never the case for regular cabbies, but for whatever reason decided to apply this to ride hailing apps only.

>Contractors don't just hang around your job site because you tell them you don't have work for them now but "stick around 5 minutes or 2 hours, we might have some then".

Right, because the labor required to build a house isn't spiky like the demand for drivers.

I wonder, would cabs be more competitive of Uber's alternative business model, if Uber had to be fairer?

If so, then isn't Uber a sham? And shouldn't market forces see them go?

Airbnb used to be cheap... at the start. Then people added insurance, people had to get permits, and so on, just as Hotels, and other do. Now it's not so cheap any more.

One of the biggest disruptions is "don't pay your fair share". Or "pay people dirt wages".

Companies carve out a new business model, and aren't taxed or forced to pay as incumbents are.

Are people against people making a fair wage? Well guess what, you have to pay more for an Uber. And maybe Uber doesn't work as a business model unless it's too expensive.

Too bad! Uber has to work in the same ecosystem as everyone else... or it's a farce.

>I wonder, would cabs be more competitive of Uber's alternative business model, if Uber had to be fairer?

None of which applies to cabs, who are also independent contractors. For instance

>The tight margins of the hack trade can leave cabbies feeling frustrated. “Sometimes, I don’t like it, because I have the potential to lose money,” said M. D. Islam, a cabby from Queens who has been driving for six months. He often earns less than $100 a day, he said; if his cab breaks down, or he can’t find passengers, he may end up in the red.

https://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/23/nyregion/new-york-taxi-dr...

Well in an area I vacation there was a fatal fire at a weekly rental home with unlicensed electrical work, no working smoke detectors and no license to rent the unit (requires a town inspection). Of course the renters had used an app platform that gives them the illusion that these are somehow legal vetted and safe.

Instead you can end up in a rental with safety standards well below developing world standards.

The market they operate is of their own making, there is no "free market" argument to be made here. What's absurd is the mischaracterization of what their constructed market can provide to its participants, particularly when people are apparently randomly banned from participating it as they please.

Stock markets for example generally have circuit breakers and limit up/down rules that will put in pauses for a stock if there is too much volatility. However they do not institute asymmetric throttling by say restricting half of sellers from selling but allowing buyers orders through.

These are 'zero hour' contracts a popular tool in the UK for businesses you screw over poor employees.

There is some utility for workers too - some people need to be able to say 'I'm not coming in today', or 'I'm leaving right now', often due to carer responsibilities though. The power lies with the business and the workers bad circumstances are often being exploited.

On the other hand, large companies are basically private armies in which the presumably passive shareholders are so distant from the actions taken on their benefit that people almost never go to jail unless they are deliberately thrown to the wolves by shareholders or superiors.

Tell that to Bill Hwang or Sam Bankman-Fried.

Had they been scamming small investors, even for the same total dollar value, they might have actually gotten way with it.

Not only did they lose other rich peoples money, they lost money for people that were richer than them. Important distinction ..

I also think it’s clear that SBF was jailed for his effects on the rich rather than on average people. Worse than fleecing billionaires, he made them look bad. Clearly he’s a scumbag who deserves prison time, but people worse than him are free.

>I also think it’s clear that SBF was jailed for his effects on the rich rather than on average people. Worse than fleecing billionaires, he made them look bad.

"The rich" was upset enough at SBF losing $32 billion to throw the book at him, but are totally fine with the GFC causing $2 trillion in damage to the global economy?

Like the founding fathers ran their business as themselves. There isn't some Monticello LLC that Thomas Jefferson was CEO of so if TJ did something bad then he's personally liable for it. This is what's changed and is the problem, people get LLCs in situations they really don't deserve them in.

It’s an emergent property and it sucks, but there’s no conspiracy.

AFAIK the follow-on concern of manipulation of the modern legal environment as a tool for unencumbered multinational greed really began with entities like the East India Company being empowered by pontificating rulers back home granting because-I-said-so immunity for arbitrary actions outside their borders, thus establishing the ground work for industrial scale opium trading, piracy, slavery, and banana republics. We're in a period of relative reckoning now where the cash-piles thus accrued are facing some popular scrutiny, but there'll never be recompense. As we've reached the ends of the earth and new wealth to seize has become scarce, we've turned to speculation and beyond earth to mars, the metaverse, and media in general. Stock markets are largely society's greed temples and in some cases designed for money laundering (eg. Singapore stock market for the Burmese junta). Even small companies on the public markets are worth orders of magnitude more than you can earn in a lifetime, leading to an intellectual drain toward speculative systemic value extraction instead of productive ventures.

IMHO a naive hope of crypto was a reckoning, instead we received the opposite: increased speculation, libertarian multinational economics and now abject political profiteering. No action on critical issues like climate. Less international trust and diplomatic potential than we've had since WWII - truly, we are lost. But it's less a conspiracy than a back-scratching piggy trough of reverent greed-inertia, in which all pigs are created equal but a cabal of investment bankers are more equal than others. Meanwhile everyone else slave for their locally dangled currency carrot, backed primarily by golden handcuffs of mortgages, an inertia of ignorance, a charade of democratic process, increasing global population dependence on multinational trade to meet quality of life expectations, and conveniently captured choke points like identity (The End of the Nation State: The Rise of Regional Economies), food (Stuffed and Starved: The Hidden Battle for the World Food System), regulation (Preventing Regulatory Capture: Special Interest Influence and How to Limit It), international logistics (The Outlaw Ocean, International Shipping Cartels), energy (Energy Revolutions: Profiteering versus Democracy), education (Privatizing the Public University), media (Selective Control: The Political Economy of Censorship) and weaponized finance (Confessions of an Economic Hit Man, Mortgaged Democracy).

It is perhaps not overly hyperbolic to state that the challenge of our era is to determine a mode of capturing the power of emergent technology to undo this situation, and nothing less than the fate of the planet rests on doing so.

Eugenics that select for altruism, empathy and cooporation and against greed and egotism. It's absurd to keep this subject taboo as we're staring down the apocalypse. Rather everyone goes down with the ship than consider something drastic that might go against what I was taught as a kid

All that differs between them is the tax treatment each gets come tax time.

A stock with buybacks should be compared to a stock with dividend reinvestment.

If you do something other than reinvest dividends, you should sell some shares every year.

[1] https://aswathdamodaran.blogspot.com/2023/03/data-update-7-f...

[2] https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg...

You're reading this on a device made in an underpaid Asian sweatshop, wearing clothes that are the same. Old people with pension funds are no more or less complicit in the brutality of the system than you are. Try blaming the people who are causing this situation on purpose, not the millions who are just trying to navigate it as best they can.

I am complicit in a rigged system with no escape.

If the population pyramid inverts and there are too few young people, the whole concept of "retirement" becomes unsustainable, unless AI advances enough to make up the lost productivity.

Pensions are just a way of formalizing the obligation to old people, but they are not themselves the root source of the problem.

Retirement should not mean a life of air travel and cruises, achieved by pension savings.

Retirement should not mean continuing to live in your 2,500 sq. ft. ranch house in the suburbs with only car access.

John Maynard Keynes famously predicted we would be working 15 hours a week due because of increasing productivity. Where did all that productivity go?

If it's because we believed we needed ('deserved') more, then change those beliefs. If it's because of the concentration of wealth into the 0.01% then AI productivity improvements won't fix things.

The AI-mongers sell the false and unsustainable promise that AI will magically solve things so people don't need to change their habits.

Yet we can achieve a lot of savings by building more compact areas to live which don't require a car, and by building mass transit with the needs of the elderly in mind (no steps, low-frequency lines which run through neighborhoods, for those with limited mobility, etc.)

We can save money and get better health outcomes with a tried-and-true single-payer health care system done in every other developed country (eg, "Medicare For All".)

That can all be done now.

Yet we aren't. Because it's easier, and more profitable to those with money, to ignore the festering problem, with the fig leaf of 'AI' or some other future technology, and let someone else deal with it,

The US system has worse overall health outcomes, so it's like we aren't really trying.

Like, with the US privatized medical system and its parasitical medical insurance system, we can see how medical costs are higher and overall health outcomes lower than in countries with single-payer/national health care.

And if I happen to choose a health insurer which decides my cancer treatment is inappropriate, I'm either bankrupt or dead.

Yes, I'm still dependent on healthcare, but one is better aligned to my health.

Similarly, the personal pension system requires staff and/or custom software to handle customer relations, and the individual funds have marketing budget to convince people to join. This disappears with a nationalized system where it can all be part of the same social security system, and benefit from the economy of scale.

Furthermore, companies justify all sorts of unethical practices because they point to all the (abstract) pensioners who will lose their retirement, which relies on those pensioners not being able to say 'no, don't do it in my name.'

While something like the Government Pension Fund of Norway can select funds and influence the corporate governance in a way which is aligned with national goals.

Yes, there are all sort of ethical funds I could invest in. The paradox of choice and my complete lack of expertise means I must hire that expertise, like when I got advice when I set up my account.

Furthermore, if I happen to select green energy stocks, but they go down the toilet after the invention of Mr. Fusion, I'm currently screwed. While a public pension has the mandate of supporting everyone.

Yes, I'm still dependent on stock investemtns, but one is better aligned to my retirement.

Lastly, the government can raise money from taxes. The government can pay for more nurses and doctors, and training hospitals. The government can pay for high-quality retirement housing. The government can do a lot of things that a private pension plan cannot do.

That's because most crimes "individuals" do are straightforwardly illegal and easy to prosecute, whereas the "crime if a corporation does it" are not. It's not any different than say, simple property crimes (eg. stealing or vandalism) vs white collar crimes, both of which can be perpetrated by individuals but the latter are far harder to prosecute. Stealing a candy bar is an open and shut case, especially with surveillance footage. A long firm fraud[1] is far harder to prosecute. If you buy a truckload of candy bars on credit, fail to repay the vendor, and declare bankruptcy, prosecutors are going to have a hard time prosecuting the case. Having bad business acumen isn't a crime, so on the surface nothing illegal has happened. To prove wrongdoing they must prove that you intentionally acquired goods on credit without intending to pay it back, which is far harder.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_firm_fraud

Maybe that’s something that should be adjusted by a legislative body.

Crimes are only “easy” or “difficult” to prosecute because of the laws as they’re written.

Yes and no. Yes in the sense that you can make crimes very easy to prosecute, no in the sense that doing so usually makes unobjectionable or even good behavior illegal in the process. Take insider trading for example. It would be very easy to simply make selling the stock of a company you work for, or are in any other way party to, outright illegal. But this would be bad for a lot of reasons; it would make it harder for businesses to compensate employees, it would encourage employees of successful companies to leave early taking important business knowledge with them, etc. Some behavior is simply harder to make illegal because it's harder to identify by its nature, which subsequently makes it harder to enforce laws against it.

I’m no legal expert, ofc, but I’d bet that a good enough legislature could strike a balance that society can be okay with.

Whatever we have now isn’t that.

Clearly crimes were committed, and clearly layers and layers of management were in on the joke, but only the few little fish at the bottom who were dumb enough to ever put things into writing with a paper trail went to jail.

A lot of the alleged rogue traders were far less rogue than their employers would like you to believe, similar with the LIBOR fixing scandal, etc.

J6 is very similar because there will never be a paper trail of the Orange man sending written orders to storm the Capitol. Everything is a wink and a nod.

The guy at the top never actually says the thing, the next rung down maybe says it but only 1-1 in-person in a secure environment, a few levels down maybe a phone call & hopes not to be tapped, a few more layers down you start to get to the idiots who send a text/email.

Akin to the Mafia.

Georgia literally has a recording of a criminal threatening to retaliate against a public official if they don't rig the election.

It is a bit unexpected I suppose for a normally friendly party to be recording your phone call. He did work in a less regulated environment than banking so recorded phone call probably caught him by surprise. No one was that dumb at banks (most calls are recorded and there’s often even a beep to remind you the line is recorded).

Corporations are giant responsibility diffusion machines and more often than not they stumble into illegal activity rather than internally commit to it. Hence, they are not acting intentionally. Also relevant is my assertion that this bumbling illegal behavior also needs better enforcement - it's just civil in nature and not criminal.

The problem is to prove that something is done intentional, on a "corporate level", whatever that means in the given case. Imagine having a law where breaking it would mean that the business have to shutdown. A competitor could pay off someone inside the company to break the law deliberately to have the legal system remove competition.

You still have the problem of punishing diffuse guilt. The correct answer is fines. Massive fines, potentially to the point of bankruptcy. We don't like to do that, however, because corporations have many stakeholders who may not deserve punishment, e.g. employees.

There's countless ways around the issue of "average" employees being punished. E.g. hard caps on top employee compensation for X years. Bans on dividends.

Forced stock dilution, now that's a solid one. Create extra shares equivalent to 20% of market cap, given to the government who sells them on the open market.

I'm sure there's holes in these but plenty of smarter people than me who can easily make them watertight.

How do either of these help an employee of a company that was just poofed?

> there's holes in these but plenty of smarter people than me who can easily make them watertight

No. There aren't. Both the caps you proposed--capping dividends and salary--have known workarounds. Stock buybacks exist because they're more tax efficient than dividends. Health insurance is tied to employment because in WWII the U.S. government capped wages.

There is really one solution to corporate malfeasance: criminaly prosecuting where you have evidence of individual criminality and massive fines in every other case. We bankrupted our automakers without hurting their jobs. That's actually less intrusive than trying to fuck with their capital structure by e.g. banning dividends, which just incentivises leverage.

You're again reinventing corporate fines in a way that makes them problematic. You've not only dissolved limited liability, which makes investing in equities a rich man's game, you're proposing going after tens if not hundres of millions of Americans if a single Fortune 500 breaks a law. That's mechanically impossible.

> Next time it is sold the sale price goes toward the fine. And so does any dividend paid.

Poor people pay the fine. Rich borrow against their shares.

None of these problems exist with massive fines. None of them add anything, procedurraly or punitively, over massive fines. The idea that shareholders are going to do legal scrutiny when many professional investors barely read public filings is laughable. Re-inventing fines is rolling your own legal system when we have centuries of good law to rely on deriving from corporations suing each other.

Those employees disagree with you and they vote. Every district has large employers whose employees would, as a voting bloc, flip a primary or even general election.

Americans do. But every time it comes up, the discussion gets derailed with these ancilliary ideas. Just look at this thread. Fines are old and boring.

> the large fines aren't assessed because those in the position to be fined also as a rule have more influence over the system

There is also the practical matter of the power to levy large fines being, itself, immensely powerful. You don't want to create a fine czar only to lose control of them in a term or two.

Corporations are hierarchical.

> however, because corporations have many stakeholders who may not deserve punishment, e.g. employees.

Hiding behind the employees. The ones with the least stake in the company. That’s a classic.

They might have their two weeks notice. What else? “There might be no other jobs around?”

Class collaboration is a lie.

"Let them eat cake" isn't a winning pitch when it's your job on the line.

No, I'm pointing out the real limitations on the types of punishments that folks--typically on the left, with good intentions but breathlessly naively--like to propose. Ignoring the board doesn't make you a smarter player.

I'm then pointing out the option that works within those limitations to exact tremendous justice. The option that when it comes up, anyone in its crosshairs will immediately start pointing to hare-brained schemes like a "corporate death penalty" to get out of. Massive. Fines.

(For those who prefer jail time to fines, do you really thing Bytedance's CZ would trade his 6 months in jail for the tens of billions he's personally walked away with?)

The incentives align to encourage executives to commit crimes in service of short-term gains — even in the extreme case of Wells Fargo, Carrie Tolstedt and John Stumpf have both avoided prison time and ended up money ahead to the tune of tens of millions of dollars, even after clawbacks and fines.

Not only shouldn't intent matter, we should assume the worst. Whether assuming the worst is a workable enforcement regime, I don't know — but it most accurately models a reality where the most rational behavior for executives is indifference to the law.

Yknow maybe the modern day requires rethinking of some regulations regarding corporations.

Yes, but why are individual crimes easy to prosecute and corporate crimes not. These are not things that just popped into being like a thunderstorm. They are a part of an economic and social system that makes things in such way.

I.e., shoplifter steals candy bar, surveillance camera has clear view of the shoplifters face, and of the theft, and security camera in parking lot gets license plate of car they drive away in. Easy conviction for prosecutor, as there little question of who committed nor of what crime was committed.

Contrast that with the GP's example "business type" crime. To prove the "business" committed a crime, they have to find a way to prove the business, when buying the truckload of candy bars, at the time of the purchase, intentionally never intended to pay back the loan taken out to buy the truckload. Proving intent (i.e., effectively "mind-reading") is way more difficult than proving a crime happened in the "shoplifter" example above. There's no security camera footage recording the "intent" of the business when it purchased the truckload of candy bars.

> They are a part of an economic and social system that makes things in such way.

It’s difficult to prove intent but we make that necessary to prove when it doesn’t have to be. It could be that negligence is enough for it to be a crime.

The difficulty with corporations is that demonstrating anything about their behavior at all (negligence, intent, ignorance, malice, stupidity...) requires doing so for a corporate body, in the sense of that word that refers to a thing visibly composed of many other distinct things.

What does a corporation want? What does that question even mean? Was a corporation negligent? Does that refer to its officers? Its employees? Specific employees? A written plan?

It's not that hard to come up with a definition of what you mean by a corporation for the purposes of defining a specific type of behavior. For example, you may regard negligence as being a property of the board, exhibited by the decisions the board makes. However, any given definition likely misses cases where a reasonable person would still tend to feel that "the corporation was negligent".

This doesn't come from the for-profit aspects of a corporation, or its existence as part of a capitalist economy. It comes from the aggregate nature of a corporation, and talking about any sort of intent-ful behavior in the context of an aggregate is challenging.

Would we be able to have a world in which there are almost no bugs? Yes, definitely. Would that be a better world?... I tend to say no. Because we trade more bugs for faster development. Because not all bugs are critical. Because some requirements are not completely consistent. And other reasons.

I imagine it's the same with the law. That is not to say there are no improvements to be made, but unless multiple people with lots of experience in the field come and say "this would be better with no side effects" I would be cautious.

If you're trying to imply such crimes are hard to prosecute because The Powers That Be™ deliberately made it that, how does that explain the difficulty in prosecuting long firm fraud (and other white collar crimes)? You can argue that price fixing being hard to prosecute helps "corporate America" or whatever, but basically everyone is united against long firm fraud. Yet, it's hard to prosecute. Why is that?

Because that's seemingly what you were asking about? If not clarify what you originally meant rather than beating around the bush then being surprised when people aren't focusing on the things you want.

>>>Like what? Moreover, what does this hold for public policy? Should we bring back debtor's prisons? That would be the obvious solution to long firm fraud.

>>I’m not an expert, but the way you wrote your comment seemed to be discounting this possibility for no discernible reason

>Debtor's prisons were widely considered to be cruel, which is why they were abolished basically everywhere in the developed world.

* policy is majorly influenced, to the point of near dictatorship, by shareholder profits

* thus, crimes perpetuated in the name of these profits are vague, hard to define, hard to prosecute

* some white collar crime, that shareholders despise, remains difficult to prosecute despite being aligned with the interests of this dominating power

The idea is similar to Tragedy of the Commons issues. The collective community, or aggregate view is "fraud bad", yet the individual, provided opportunity and anonymity, acts in the their own self interest, especially where punishment is viewed as difficult or low plausibility.

Similar issues occur with the general concept of honesty, and views of social honesty. Surveyed, personal belief is that most respondents would state that other humans should reply honestly, with accurate information. However, many, in personal action and isolated opportunities are quite willing to embellish, neglect to correct a mistake, or outright lie.

Neglecting to correct a mistake is one of the most difficult, and shows up quite frequently in markets. With the markets often congratulating recipients for taking advantage of fools who priced something "wrong." Lots of various rationalizations that then get used. "Its their own fault", "they won't notice the difference", "I'm just more clever", "we deserve it because of our status", ect... Usually, seems more frequent the further away, the less personal, and the more abstract the lie or theft. Much like the article title. Office Space did this joke a long time ago.

  Peter: Ah no, you don't understand. It's very complicated. It's, uh, it's aggregate, so I'm talking about fractions of a penny here. And over time they add up to a lot.
  Joanna: Oh okay. So you're gonna be making a lot of money, right?
  Peter: Yeah.
  Joanna: Right. It's not yours?
  Peter: Well it becomes ours.
  Joanna: How is that not stealing?

Okay, what should we do to tackle long firm fraud?

Who are all the people lobbying to keep long firm fraud hard to prosecute?

>and fully treat businesses like a person (jail, death).

Getting stuff on credit and then defaulting on the debt isn't illegal for natural persons either.

That's part of the point and problem because it is by design. Rich people and corporations like treating their problems as so complex as to be completely intractable. "How do you tax me when I don't have income?!" "How can I be responsible for a system of decisions?!" Etc. Rich people and corporations want nothing but upsides, and they have designed the system to work this way.

A great example of this is Steve Cohen, who got away with insider trading for years. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1szayJV505M. You're telling me that a small business owner whose direct reports repeatedly commit and are convicted of fraud would just be able to walk away? Yea, right. In Cohen's case, he just walked away and bought a sports team.

Monetary risk is not a real enough risk.

What should happen is to send the share price to zero or give to the government.

This was e.g. done with 2008 financial crisis for Fannie Mae and it had been paying dividends to the US citizens since then.

However there exists discussion whether this was a good thing in the end.

Obviously that's not the same as havingva million of currently empty capacity, but still.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42831013

> 5 years of jail time distributed across the top 20 shareholders proportional to their stake

Ideally a judge wouldn't hand out such a sentence if it involved punishing people who didn't have a controlling stake, but I don't think we should rule such things out. I can be held criminally liable for negligence when my dog does something that I wasn't even around for or aware of, there's no reason that shareholders couldn't also. If you don't have enough control to prevent your property from committing crimes, you should probably change that.

I don't know enough about where corporate structure norms stop and where the law starts to know if "the board" is something that is always going to be available for prosecution, which is why in general I mean the shareholders.

It's large players with board positions who reap the benefits and turn a blind eye to blatant corruption.

If you own even a fraction of a share of a business (say IBM), you are, by definition, a "shareholder" in that business. It does not matter if it is via the RobinHood app., or a JP Morgan Chase Premier Brokerage Account.

If you have neither control nor information that is sufficient for betting that the investment won't harm people, don't invest.

Though I agree that monetary punishments to the company are much more effective than jail for some random shareholders. They just need to be large enough.

It's not taboo, it's stupid and unworkable. You're proposing sending half of America to jail if any Fortune 500 commits a crime. That's a get-out-of-jail-free card, not meaningful deterrence.

Massive. Fines. Everyone keeps trying to be creative about penalising corporations without levying massive fines. Just levy the fines. You don't need to lay anyone off, you're just wiping the shareholders (and management) of their wealth and transferring ownership to creditors.

The "corporate death penalty" was the greatest invention of the corporate lobbyist. It successfully derails conversations about massive fines, which are workable and scary, into ones about charter revocations and whatnot, which is not.

> You're proposing sending half of America to jail if any Fortune 500 commits a crime. That's a get-out-of-jail-free card, not meaningful deterrence.

This is a poor argument.

If the law would be as such and be upheld, everyone would start making damm sure the companies they invest in are trying their hardest to adhere to the law. It would also work as a strong counterbalance to megacorps. Both which would be incredibly positive developments.

It's similar to rules in football. "Well if you start carding players for getting angry at the ref then half the team will get a yellow card every game!". Yes, the very first game this might happen. The second and third it sure won't.

So everyone in the US is going to do due diligence on all 500 companies in the S&P 500?

Also you act as if the majority of Americans care about the law or ethics? You do remember the election we just had don’t you? The support that the majority has for 1500 criminals who just got pardoned?

You're proposing bankrupting millions of Americans' retirements because Uber didn't follow local taxi rules?

> if $100 billion fines were on the table for companies like uber, that diligence would be priced into the stock and it would be far more effective

Yes. Again, we're re-inventing massive fines.

It wouldn't be upheld. It couldn't be upheld. The first time somebody were stupid enough to try to uphold it, it would prompt a popular firestorm that would undo its effects. (I'm not even approaching the numerical impposibility of attempting to enforce something like that.)

You say that shouldn't be taboo, it should be debatable. Alright, I'm listening, tell me how that wouldbsolve more problems than it would create.

But supposing that you did propagate it to every shareholder... I think that creating an incentive to divest in companies that are likely to commit crimes, and to avoid financial instruments where you can't be sure just what it is your money is up to, would create a much healthier investment environment. There would be more homework done before deciding which companies ought to get the boost. As it is, there are no market forces working to prevent cases where investors are enabling activity that are harmful to the rest of us.

Those mutual and index funds where the investor is disconnected from whatever harms their money is doing are a hazard to us all. Investing should mean understanding what you're investing in. The whole system needs more types of risk, it's currently like a car with no steering wheel.

You didn't, but the person I replied to did.

Two comments up was:

> So should every one who owns stock in a company - including mutual funds go to jail?

And the person I replied to says maybe so, let's consider it.

56% of US civilian workers have a IRA/401k or other work retirement plan. I say no, let's not consider jailing a majority of the country's working population.

> One's investment into a criminal enterprise could arguably be contributing to or encouraging that crime

Every shareholder is an “investor”. Well not really, when you buy a stock unless you buy at IPO or secondary offering, you are buying an ownership share from another holder.

So if you really want to go after “investors” you would have to find all of the investors who invested before the company went public and the ones who bought at IPO.

We also have to go after any bank who lent the company money since they were also “involved in the criminal enterprise”.

In the case of Amazon, you would definitely have to go after Bezo’s ex-wife since she is a major shareholder.

we as a society are better off when people take risks

If the corresponding reward is that I pull off a successful crime, then we as a society are worse off for having funded the risk.

The thing is though - in America people are corporations except of course no one will teach you that. Open an single-person LLC and boom - you are now corporation. Have a rental, move it under LLC, own a car, LLC… now you are corporation (with limited to no liability) :)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piercing_the_corporate_veil

Moreover most of the difficulty in prosecuting corporate crimes comes from the fact that responsibility is spread across multiple people, that it's hard to prove anyone did anything wrong. Obviously that won't work with a single person corporation.

https://www.abc10.com/article/news/local/wildfire/pges-mansl...

Minus the crime part to be clear. I actually try to hold myself to a high ethical standard.

The laws exist for a reason and it's not to protect the wages class of people who drive taxis. Since ride-sharing doesn't break the letter nor the spirit there is very little desire to change laws to make it illegal.

An individual choosing to break the law on the other hand, well, we've already seen what happens, things get bad fairly quickly as opposed to the decade plus of relatively spotless service from Uber and similar companies. There is even a statistically significant gap in DUIs compared to certain cities that banned ride-sharing companies, though I haven't seen a proper meta-analysis yet.

And by the way, this is preaching to the choir. Nothing will change if we keep echoing the same things to ourselves.