New York Uber Uber
Score one more for government control, corruption, and general silliness. New York’s TLC threw down the glove a while ago on the “Uber” application which allows taxi and “black car” drivers to arrange rides over the Internet. This isn’t the first time TLC has acted all crazy and stuff. Wait, wrong TLC. Oh well — the sentence two previous to this one applies even without the link.
You can’t fight City Hall — after all, this is the same commission which magically decided to replace every taxi in New York with Japanese minivans assembled in Mexico that didn’t actually exist at the time of the decision, and nobody said nothing, yo. No surprise, then, that Uber is leaving Gotham like Batman riding that bomb out to the ocean in the last Dark Knight film.
Sorry for spoiling the film for you, if you haven’t seen it. However, it turns out that Batman wasn’t on the plane. He actually checked some code into Wayne Enterprises’ subversion or ClearCase or whatever that fixed the autopilot, and he’s hanging out in Italy with Anne Hathaway. Because he totally had a bunch of time to code while he was busy saving the world. I want to believe that the autopilot was written in GNU C++, by the way. But anyway, he isn’t dead.
Oh, damn. Now I’m really sorry. Also, the chick in the Crying Game was a man. And Kevin Spacey is Keyser Soze. I have to stop doing this. DARTH VADER IS LUKE’S FATHER AND ALSO LEIA IS HIS SISTER SO WHAT WAS THAT WHOLE KISS ABOUT WHEN HE CAME OUT OF THE WEIRD HEALING TANK OOOOH?
Where were we? Yes. Uber. According to The Verge, Uber asked everybody to come in for their checks this month — and hand in your phone while you’re at it, please. This shutdown only applies to Ubertaxi: the “Black Car” service is still up. For now. But probably not for long. Because Uber is the smartphone app the city deserves, but not the one it needs right now.
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Seems to me this is the free market working as it should. Oh, I know, its this bright and shiny Utopia that perfectly defines working economics. The reality is Greed, as some who work on Wall Street and comment on TTAC have alluded to, being a very fickle mistress who likes things they way they are and can become violently reactionary when it comes to change. These fortunates rig the system so it continues to work for them at the expense of the masses standing in the rain, hoping for a yellow cab to stop and take them uptown.
"Sorry for spoiling the film for you, if you haven’t seen it" Hmmm. I seem to recall a friend who told me he was Tivo'ing the race when I texted him that the problem with Dario Franchitti winning the Indy 500 was having to watch Ashley Judd hog camera time.