Category: Transportation

How Convenient

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It turns out that Uber and Lyft were paying community groups to act as AstroTurf in favor of the Gypsy cab companies.

Hoocoodanote?

At the end of February, an impassioned op-ed appeared in The Chicago Crusader, a well-established Black newspaper in the city. Titled “Why Independent Workers Want to Stay Independent,” the op-ed argued that gig economy companies like Uber and Lyft are a “lifeline” to communities of color by providing “a flexible way to work.”

One week later the exact same op-ed was published in the bilingual El Dia Newspaper. Two months later, a version of it appeared again in Crain’s Chicago Business newspaper.

Similar articles and op-eds riffing on the theme of “protecting” independent work have popped up in local publications all over the country, from Colorado to Massachusetts to New Jersey to New York.

In some of these states the articles have a common thread: Their authors represent organizations that serve communities of color and have received recent donations from Lyft, and in some cases Uber or DoorDash.

The op-eds are one facet of a multimillion-dollar lobbying campaign aimed at fighting regulations that would require the companies to treat drivers and delivery workers as full-fledged employees. Over the past several months, news outlets have detailed political action committees set up by Uber and Lyft in New York and Illinois. The Markup found that the practice was even wider spread, occurring in other states and often involving alliances with local community groups.

It’s not an alliance, it’s prostitution.

This is Marjorie Taylor Greene Level Stupid

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Clearing out the library books on a cruise ship with bumping nightlife to slow the spread of coronavirus is some real galaxy-brain stuff! pic.twitter.com/cB5BR23pa9

— Andrew Dunckelman (@andrewdunck) June 16, 2021

Seriously, on a Cruise Ship they take all the books out of the library to prevent Covid transmission, while they are having nightly dances, and the passengers and crews f%$#ing like bunnies.

Today in Hack Journalism

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The New York Times has an article about how how some drivers are trying to form a cooperative to compete with Uber and Lyft.

There are a lot of obstacles that this effort faces, but this paragraph is full of fail:

………

The Drivers Cooperative, which opened for business in New York this week, is the most recent attempt. The group, founded by a former Uber employee, a labor organizer and a black-car driver, began issuing ownership shares to drivers in early May and will start offering rides through its app on Sunday.

The cooperative has recruited around 2,500 drivers so far and intends to take a smaller commission than Uber or Lyft and charge riders a lower fare. It is an ambitious plan to challenge the ride-hailing giants, and it faces the same hurdles that tend to block other emerging players in the industry: Few have the technical prowess, the venture capital dollars or the supply of readily available drivers to subvert an established company like Uber.

(emphasis mine)

Clearly there are network effects, Uber and Lyft have a pool of drivers as well as customers who use theri apps, and both of the gypsy cab company firms have sufficient VC money to operate for years at a loss.  (In fact neither appears to have a path to profitability)

However, the claim that operating a ride share firm requires any significant technical prowess is false, and does not withstand 5 minutes of examination.

The creation of apps with review capabilities has been old school for over a decade.

Claiming that there is a need for specialized “technical prowess”, is a humbug, and it pisses me off.

The innovation of Uber and Lyft were never technical, but regulatory.

Their innovation was that the two firms found a way to break the law and bulldoze authorities into acquiescence, not any technical innovation.

I’ll Believe It When I See It

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United Airlines has put in an order for Boom Supersonic’s Overture airliner.

There has never been a meaningful Supersonic Transport (SST) that has entered service without billions in public subsidies, so I do not expect this aircraft to see service. 

The financial numbers are just not there, as shown by the recent demise of the Aerion supersonic business jet.

I don’t know why United put in an order, but I don’t ever expect them to actually fly the aircraft:

More than half a century after placing options for the European-made Concorde, United Airlines is once again banking on the commercial allure of speed by becoming the first operator to order its spiritual successor—Boom Supersonic’s Overture.

United never flew the Concorde.

The startling deal, which covers orders for 15 aircraft with options on a further 35, is a key milestone toward the revival of faster-than-sound commercial transport and a major boost for the Denver-based startup aircraft manufacturer.

………

The United deal envisages introduction of the first civil supersonic services on transatlantic and Pacific routes by 2029. The Overture will be designed to cruise at Mach 1.7 [Down from earlier goal of Mach 2.2] and carry up to 88 passengers on routes up to 4,250 nm using 100% sustainable aviation fuel (SAF).

Note that, much like the Concorde, this jet cannot operate at supersonic speeds over land, and even if it uses “Sustainable” fuel, a subsonic airliner will carry more 2 to 3 times people on a gallon of fuel.

The numbers just don’t add up.

Of Course They Are

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Hoocoodanode?

After making nice to the drivers in order to get Proposition 22 passed, Uber and Lyft have reversed their employee friendly policies, because their drivers are disposable, and they have no more need to make nice with them.

This outcome was completely predictable:

Last year, the ride-hailing service Uber gave its drivers unprecedented control over their fares and working conditions.

The goal was to win drivers’ support for Proposition 22, through which Uber and other gig companies aimed to rewrite California labor law in the companies’ favor.

The firms’ pitch was that the ballot measure would preserve the “flexibility” in hours and earnings that their workers valued, and that they said would be threatened unless the labor law was changed.

Uber’s new options seemed to make that flexibility more real: The company gave drivers more latitude to set their own fares, and more visibility into the trips they were offered before deciding whether to accept them.

Proposition 22 was passed by an overwhelming margin in the November election. Since then, some drivers say, Uber has taken the flexibility options away, and even cut the drivers’ income on many trips.

Lyft executives raised the same alarm during a Wall Street conference call after the firm released its first-quarter financial results on May 4.

Driver advocates have greeted these remarks skeptically, noting that the firms could attract more drivers quickly by improving their pay.

………

But when California codified labor rules to mandate that such workers receive all the benefits of employees, Uber, Lyft and other gig companies drafted Proposition 22 to exempt their drivers, delivery workers and others from the employment rules and allow them to be classified as independent contractors.

After a campaign in which the companies spent more than $200 million, a national record for a ballot measure, Proposition 22 passed with nearly 60% of the vote.

“A huge part of their Proposition 22 campaign was to get the drivers on their side,” says Veena Dubal, a labor law expert at UC Hastings College of the Law and a critic of Uber and Lyft. “So they rolled out these things they knew that drivers would be excited about and would make them feel independent. And of course they’ve thrown them away.”

………

Support for the bill has been waning since organized labor took a closer look at its terms. They discovered that it would bar workers from striking or taking any other job action and forbid local governments from imposing a minimum wage for gig workers.

………

Uber also has sharply cut drivers’ pay for trips originating at Los Angeles International, San Francisco and San Diego airports. At LAX and San Diego, drivers say, they now receive 32 cents per mile, regardless of the distance traveled.

That’s down from about 60 cents before the passage of Proposition 22, drivers say. It’s also well below the 56 cents per mile that the Internal Revenue Service has set as the deductible cost of ownership of cars driven for business use, counting fuel, maintenance, insurance and wear and tear.

It’s like the tale of the scorpion and the frog, it’s in their nature.

You should not be surprised when it stings you.

Not this Sh%$ Again

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Yeah, like this

It seems that every few years, someone tries to pitch airships as a solution to some transportation conundrum, this time, it for making short trips across a body of water.

The numbers are compelling, about 90% less carbon per passenger than an aircraft, but the competitor would be a high speed ferry, which would have additional capabilities, like carrying cars and cargo.

The example that they give is Barcelona to Palma de Mallorca route, which they claim would take 100 passengers, “Four and a half hours,” to reach their destination

A ferry trip, according to google maps, is 212 km (132 miles), so a high speed (30 kt — 55.6 km/h — 34.5 mph, and some ferries reach 50 kt) ferry could make the transit in the same amount of time, and not require any new shore facilities.

The counter-argument is “But Airships!”

The Colonial Pipeline Was Unaffected by the Ransomeware Attack

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It turns out that the systems controlling the pipeline continued to function as intended, it was only the billing systems were hit, which means that the decision to shut down the pipeline, which threw much of the East Coast of the US into a panic, was not about safety, and critical infrastructure was not impacted, it was just that collecting payments from customers became more inconvenient.

The technical term for what Colonial did was irresponsible, and possibly negligent.

Why am I not surprised that Koch Industries, aka, the Koch Brothers, are a major shareholder?

This, “F%$# you, pay me,” attitude is integral to their warped souls:

The cyber attack that shutdown the Colonial pipeline causing a gas panic and stoking fears of gasoline shortages, didn’t actually shut down the pipeline. It impacted the billing system at the Colonial Pipeline Co., which shut it down because they were worried about how they’d collect payments. 

Yes, the fuel-carrying pipeline was shut down last week in order to prevent a company that is entrusted with what should be a public utility from enduring an accounting headache.

I really hope that someone, I’m looking at you Katie Porter, to whip out the old white board, and cut the executives running a new asshole at hearings.

For the problem described, they could have set up a paper system, and faxes, (or scanners and Gmail) to handle billing temporarily in perhaps 48 hours.

Yeah, Subsidies, That Will Work

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The California Air Resources Board (CARB) has come to the conclusion that the Gypsy cab companies like Uber and Lyft are dysproportionally responsivle for greenhouse gas emissions in the state, and so they are looking to pass a rule mandating electric vehicle adoptions by those companies.

Uber and Lyft want public subsidies to follow the law.

The response of California should be to tell them to go Cheney themselves:

California clean-air regulators want nearly all trips on Uber and Lyft ride-hailing platforms to be in electric vehicles, mandating costly measures that the companies call unrealistic without more public subsidies for EVs.

………

And yet the firms are pushing back on the CARB effort to force the transition, arguing taxpayers should shoulder much of the burden.

………

Uber and Lyft say they can’t afford the EV transition either. Uber said in a December letter to CARB that, without “sufficient” subsidies, the rule would unduly burden the companies, along with their drivers and consumers.

Uber and Lyft have already proved that they are an enemy of good government (Proposition 22), let them pay their own way.

Headline of the Day

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This Is the Most Embarrassing News Clip in American Transportation History

—Vice Magazine on Elon Musk’s recent video of how its Vegas tunnel “works”.

Seriously, this is literally the Disney ride “Autopia” at about twice the speed of the original.

This is not transportation, it’s not even a demonstrator of the technology.  This is a rip-off of a Disney ride by the greatest humbug of our generation.

But The Boring Company’s cost per mile isn’t as impressive as it sounds. This project avoided all the expensive parts of a mass transportation tunnelling project. The station is a big hole in the ground with a flat parking lot and doesn’t have pedestrian entrances, walkways, platforms, mezzanines, etc. The tunnel itself is also very skinny. But most importantly, tunnelling itself is never the part of American mass transit projects that create the cost overruns, which is why on-street and elevated rail projects also cost way more in the United States than elsewhere. In other words, The Boring Company avoided the most complex and costly aspects of transportation projects, shrunk it in both scale and the number of people it will supposedly serve, then bragged about how little it cost to build.

The Front Fell Off

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The Front Fell Off?

It now appears that the Ever Given, the massive container ship which had completely blocked the Suez Canal, has been freed and traffic has resumed through the waterway.

There is still a major backlog of ships in both directions, but after a week, we should expect a return to normal shipping conditions.

The bigger issue is how this event has demonstrated the fragility of international shipping.

What’s more, it has increasingly been juxtaposed with economic fragility driven by the increasingly oligopolistic nature of shipping, which means that if one shipper fails, the entire system can seize up.

The classic Clarke and Dawe sketch, “The Front Fell Off,” (shown) is a perfect metaphor for this:

In this newsletter, I do a lot of explaining about complicated problems caused by big dumb corporate institutions. I don’t have to do that this time, because the story of the mess in the Suez is so simple. “After years of bitcoin and reddit short selling and credit default swaps and a million other things I don’t understand,” one random person put in a tweet that went viral, “it’s so refreshing to hear that global commerce is in peril because a big boat got stuck in a canal.”

That’s basically the story right there, it’s a big boat and it got stuck in a canal. The ship blocking the Suez, called the Ever Given, weights 220,000 tons, and is as long as the Empire State Building is high. Despite the hilarious nature of the problem, the disruption to world trade is large and serious, costing tens of billions of dollars. And if the ship can’t be dislodged soon, some consumers will once again experience shortages of basic staples like toilet paper.

That said, the reason this disruption to global commerce seems so dumb is because it is. It starts with the ship size itself. Over the last few decades, ships have gotten really really big, four times the size of what they were 25 years ago, what the FT calls “too big to sail.’ The argument behind making such massive boats was efficiency, since you can carry more at a lower cost. The downside of such mega-ships should have been obvious. Ships like this, which are in effect floating islands, are really hard to steer in tight spaces like ports and canals, and if they get stuck, they are difficult to unstick. In other words, the super smart wizard financiers who run global trade made ships that don’t fit in the canals they need to fit into.

The rise of mega-ships is paralleled by the consolidation of the shipping industry itself. In 2000, the ten biggest shipping companies had a 12% market share, by 2019 that share had increased to 82%. This understates the consolidation, because there are alliances among these shippers. The stuck ship is being run by the Taiwanese shipping conglomerate Evergreen, which bought Italian shipping firm Italia Marittima in 1998 and London-based Hatsu in 2002, and is itself part of the OCEAN alliance, which has more than a third of global shipping.

Making ships massive, and combining such massive ships into massive shipping monopolies, is a bad way to run global commerce. We’ve already seen significant problems from big shipping lines helping to transmit financial shocks into trade shocks, such as when Korean shipper Hanjin went under and stranded $14 billion of cargo on the ocean while in bankruptcy. It’s also much harder for small producers and retailers to get shipping space, because large shippers want to deal with large clients. And fewer ports can handle these mega-ships, so such ships induce geographical inequality. Increasingly, we’re not moving ships between cities, we’re moving cities to where the small number of giant shipping lines find it efficient to ship.

Dumb big ships owned by monopolies are the result of dumb big ideas, the physical manifestation of what Thomas Friedman was pushing in the 1990s and 2000s with books such as The Lexus and the Olive Tree and The World is Flat, the idea that “taking fat out of the system at every joint” was leading towards a more prosperous, peaceful and competitive world. Friedman’s was a finance-friendly perspective, a belief that making us all interdependent with a very thin margin of error would force global cooperation.

………

What is new isn’t the vulnerability of the Suez Canal as a chokepoint, it’s that we’ve intentionally created lots of other artificial chokepoints. And since our production systems have little fat, these systems are tightly coupled, meaning a shortage in one area cascades throughout the global economy, costing us time, money, and lives.

It’s a dumb way to organize a global supply chain system, just as it was dumb to build ships that are too big to fit into canals. And that’s why the “big boat stuck in canal” is such a great illustration of the problem, it shows our policymakers and corporate leaders couldn’t even think through what would happen if Really Big Thing Got Stuck In Important Canal.

………

The answer to addressing the problem of thinned out supply chains is to recognize that hyper-efficient globalization inherently carries the downside of unpredictable shortages, geopolitical tension, and supply disruptions. And then redesign our global trading order to make it less efficient and more resilient. There are three basic changes we’ll need.

Matt Stoller calls for a rigorous enforcement of anti-monopoly measures, a reimpositition of border friction like tariffs, and a restructuring of business so that they are less indebted and less vulnerable.

Unfortunately, this will not happen, because this system was created to benefit financial institutions and to drive wages down through labor arbitrage, so his reforms are actually a repudiation of the entire system.

I support his ideas, but I don’t think that they are politically realistic at this time.

 

What, Elon Broke the Law? Pshaw!

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The NLRB has ruled that Tesla has openly and repeatedly broken labor law in its anti-union drives.

Seeing as how the car company has been killing and injuring its workers while offering them free frozen yogurt, they pretty much have to break the law to keep the unions out:

Tesla has been ordered to correct its unlawful labor practices, and its supremo Elon Musk must delete a related tweet from three years ago.

In a ruling issued on Thursday, the US National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) concluded that Tesla violated federal labor law in its efforts to discourage workers from unionizing. It directed the company to cease various anti-union actions and policies like claiming workers would lose benefits if they vote for union representation.

The NLRB found that Tesla violated labor law by coercively interrogating employees, threatening them with the loss of stock options if they supported unionization, and enacting unlawful policies like a confidentiality agreement that banned speaking to the press.

The ruling directs the vehicle maker to offer to rehire plaintiff and former employee Richard Ortiz and pay him lost wages, and to strike unlawful disciplinary information from the record of both Ortiz and another employee, Jose Moran.

It further requires Tesla to rescind portions of its 2016 confidentiality agreement that disallow lawful union-related activity under Sections 7 and 8 of the National Labor Relations Act, which the NLRB acknowledged “protects employees when they speak with the media about working conditions, labor disputes, or other terms and conditions of employment.”

The decision also directs self-styled “Technoking” Musk to delete a May 20, 2018, tweet because it implies workers must give up their stock options if they unionize.

I still think that the only to get the lawbreaking to stop is to frog-march Elon Musk out of his offices in handcuffs.

 

Yes, Lying about Self Driving Cars Is a Bad Thing, Elon

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The NTSB has called out Elon Musk and Tesla for serial lying about their self driving capabilityes, saying that this puts the driving public at risk.

This is not a surprise. 

Tesla’s culture comes from the height of the Dot Com bubble, with a, “We’ll fix it in Beta,” mentality, which is negligent at best, and potentially criminal when dealing with 4000 pound high speed death machines like automobiles:

The National Transportation Safety Board has filed comments blasting the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration for its permissive regulation of driver-assistance systems. The letter was dated February 1 but was only spotted by CNBC’s Lora Kolodny on Friday. The letter repeatedly calls out Tesla’s Autopilot for its lax safety practices and calls on NHTSA to establish minimum standards for the industry.

The dispute between federal agencies is the result of Congress dividing responsibility for transportation safety among multiple agencies. NHTSA is the main regulator for highway safety: every car and light truck must comply with rules established by NHTSA. NTSB is a separate agency that just does safety investigations. When there’s a high-profile highway crash, NTSB investigators travel to the scene to figure out what happened and how to prevent it from happening again. NTSB also does plane crashes and train wrecks, allowing it to apply lessons from one mode of transportation to others.

………

Under then-President Donald Trump, NHTSA largely let automakers do what they liked when it came to advanced driver-assistance systems (ADAS) and prototype driverless vehicles. NHTSA has generally waited until safety problems cropped up with ADAS systems and dealt with them after the fact. NTSB argues NHTSA should be more proactive, and it put Tesla and Autopilot at the center of its argument.

………

The NTSB also calls for NHTSA to require driver-monitoring systems to ensure drivers are paying attention to the road while driver-assistance systems are active.

“Because driver attention is an integral component of lower-level automation systems, a driver-monitoring system must be able to assess whether and to what degree the driver is performing the role of automation supervisor,” NTSB argued. “No minimum performance standards exist for the appropriate timing of alerts, the type of alert, or the use of redundant monitoring sensors to ensure driver engagement.”

………

Finally, NTSB argues that NHTSA should require automakers to limit use of driver-assistance systems to the types of roads they’re designed for. For example, some ADAS systems are designed to only work on limited-access freeways. Yet few cars actually enforce such limitations. Many systems can be activated on roads the systems weren’t designed for.

………

The NTSB mentions Tesla 16 times in the report—far more than any other automaker. This is partly because Tesla vehicles have figured so prominently in the NTSB’s work. NTSB says it has investigated six crashes involving driver-assistance or self-driving systems between May 2016 and March 2019. Four of those were fatal. One of these four was the 2018 death of Elaine Herzberg after she was hit by an Uber self-driving prototype. The other three were Tesla owners who relied too much on Autopilot, and it cost them their lives.

………

In its report on the crash, NTSB noted that, at the time of the crash, Autopilot software was only designed for use on controlled-access freeways—not rural highways where cars and trucks can enter the highway directly from driveways and side streets. NTSB pointed out that its report on the Brown crash “recommended that NHTSA develop a method to verify” that companies selling driver-assistance systems like Autopilot have safeguards to prevent customers from using the systems on roads they aren’t designed for. Such a system might have prevented Brown from activating Autopilot on the day of his death.

………

“The NTSB remains concerned about NHTSA’s continued failure to recognize the importance of ensuring that acceptable safeguards are in place so the vehicles do not operate outside of their operational design domains and beyond the capabilities of their system designs,” the agency wrote. “Because NHTSA has put in place no requirements, manufacturers can operate and test vehicles virtually anywhere, even if the location exceeds the AV control system’s limitations.”

NTSB then called out Tesla again, specifically criticizing the decision to release its “full self-driving beta” software to a few-dozen customers.

“Tesla recently released a beta version of its Level 2 Autopilot system, described as having full self-driving capability,” NTSB wrote. “By releasing the system, Tesla is testing on public roads a highly automated AV technology but with limited oversight and reporting requirements.”

This is negligent behavior, both on the part of Tesla and on the part of the NHTSA, and it has already gotten people killed.

Well, Now We Know Why Moscow Mitch Is Angling to Leave the Senate

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We are now seeing reports that Mitch McConnell is aggressively trying to change Kentucky law in an attempt to prevent the Democratic Governor of the state from appointing someone should he leave office.

The question is, “Why?”

There have been questions as to his health, but I think that it is rather more likely that he is deeply involved in his wife’s corrupt abuse of her office as Secretary of Transportation to benefit her family business. 

My hope is that McConnell thinks that he will at some point in the not so distant future be forced to resign as a part of a plea deal for public corruption. (I prefer his living in misery to his dying)

It has been an open secret that Elaine Chao is relentlessly corrupt, and now that it is a matter of public record, via an Inspector General report, I don’t think that it will be allowed to fade away as it did when she was Bush, Jr.’s Secretary of Transportation:

While serving as transportation secretary during the Trump administration, Elaine Chao repeatedly used her office staff to help family members who run a shipping business with extensive ties to China, a report released Wednesday by the Transportation Department’s inspector general concluded.

The inspector general referred the matter to the Justice Department in December for possible criminal investigation. But in the weeks before the end of Trump administration, two Justice Department divisions declined to do so.

Ms. Chao, the wife of Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the Republican leader, announced her resignation on Jan. 7, the day after the Capitol riot. At the time of her departure, an aide to Ms. Chao said her resignation was unrelated to the inspector general’s investigation.

The investigation of Ms. Chao came after a 2019 report in The New York Times that detailed her interactions with her family while serving as transportation secretary, including a trip she had planned to take to China in 2017 with her father and sister. The inspector general’s report confirmed that the planning for the trip, which was canceled, raised ethics concerns among other government officials.

As transportation secretary, Ms. Chao was the top Trump administration official overseeing the American shipping industry, which is in steep decline and is being battered by Chinese competitors.

………

The investigators did not make a formal finding that Ms. Chao violated ethics rules. But they detailed more than a dozen instances where her office took steps to handle matters related to her father, who built up a New York-based shipping company after immigrating to the United States from Taiwan in the late 1950s, and to her sister, who runs the company now.

These included an interview with a Chinese-language television station at the New York City headquarters of Foremost Group, the shipping company. The focus of the conversation there, according to a Transportation Department translation of the media plan prepared for the interview, was to discuss how Ms. Chao’s father, James Chao, had been “dubbed ‘Chinese Ship King,’ how Foremost Group ‘ascended to its status in the world,’ and Dr. Chao’s business endeavors.”

………

Ms. Chao had declined to respond to questions from the inspector general and instead provided a  memo that detailed the importance of promoting her family as part of her official duties.

“Anyone familiar with Asian culture knows it is a core value in Asian communities to express honor and filial respect toward one’s parents,” the September 2020 memo said. “Asian audiences welcome and respond positively to actions by the secretary that include her father in activities when appropriate,” it continued.

That explanation is complete bullsh%$, because:

The investigators found that Ms. Chao had used her staff to arrange details for Mr. Chao’s trip to China in October 2017, including asking, through the State Department, for China’s Transport Ministry to arrange for two cars for a six-person delegation, which included Ms. Chao’s younger sister Angela Chao, who had succeeded their father as head of the family shipping company, and Angela Chao’s husband, the venture capitalist Jim Breyer.

The trip had been scheduled to include stops at locations in China that had received financial support from the company and also a meeting with “top leaders” in China that was to include Elaine Chao’s father and sister, but not other members of Transportation Department staff. The trip was canceled just before Ms. Chao’s planned departure after ethics concerns were raised by officials at the State and Transportation Departments.

The investigators also found that she repeatedly asked agency staff members to help do chores for her father, including editing his Wikipedia page and promoting his Chinese-language biography. They said she directed two staff members from her office to send a copy of Mr. Chao’s book “to a well-known C.E.O. of a major U.S. corporation” to ask if he would write a foreword for it.

No one in China ever heard about the above.  This was about using government resources to corruptly benefit her immediate family.

………

The report said that none of the Transportation Department employees interviewed “described feeling ordered or coerced to perform personal or inappropriate tasks for the secretary.”

In deciding not to take up a potential criminal case, the report said, the Justice Department notified the inspector general that “there may be ethical and/or administrative issues to address but there is not predication to open a criminal investigation.”

Of course they did not find a reason to open a criminal investigation, William Barr was acting as Donald Trump’s personal consigliere rather than as Attorney General.

I am not suggesting that Joe Biden should tell Merrick Garland to criminally investigate Elaine Chao, it is an inappropriate for a President to give these sorts of instructions to the Department of Justice.

However, I do think that it is appropriate for Joe Biden to tell Merrick Garland that he should make all resources possible available for investigations of official wrongdoing that might have been short-changed under William Barr.

This would include, of course the behavior of both William Barr and Elaine Chao, and that if professional prosecutors determine there is probably cause for an investigation, that all resources necessary be allocated to clear up such matters as expeditiously as possible.

And the Infection Spreads

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The Wheels bus system in northern California has decided to start subsidizing Lyft and Uber:

In a first for California, a public transit agency next month plans to begin subsidizing fares of people who take private Uber and Lyft cars to local destinations rather than riding the bus.

Passengers ordering Uber or Lyft car trips within two test areas of Dublin will be eligible to get door-to-destination service at a big discount under a partnership between the ride-hailing companies and the Wheels public bus system in Dublin, Alameda and Pleasanton.

The Livermore Amador Valley Transit Authority, which operates Wheels, said the one-year pilot project could help pave the way for changes in how public transit agencies in the United States serve suburban areas hampered by far-flung bus routes, few riders and little money from fares.

This is going to end in a morass of corruption and incompetence.

See my post on the city of Arlington, VA considering the same here.

From Libertarian Ubermensch to Sucking at the Taxpayer’s Tit

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The city of Arlington Virginia is looking at paying Uber to take people to metro stops:

Arlington County is looking to partner with transportation providers such as Uber and Lyft to offer residents rides from more remote residential areas of the county where bus service to Metro stations is limited.

The on-demand option would replace some fixed bus service in north Arlington.

“What we would be supporting is picking up residents in their neighborhood and taking them to one or two designated stops, most likely a transit station,” said Marti Reinfeld, the county’s interim transit bureau chief. “The county will subsidize that at some level.”

It could take a couple of years before such a program launches, but county transportation officials say they want to do so as soon as possible. Arlington joins a growing number of U.S. transit agencies that are exploring partnerships with the popular app-based companies to leverage their success and improve service to residents.

I guess that Uber is changing its business plan:  Instead of just abusing and endangering drivers and passengers, they will now also suck up taxpayer money that would otherwise go to providing decent mass transit.

This has “fail” written all over it.

Uber Gets Even More Evil

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First Uber has redefined it app to conceal when it charges surge prices to its users:

An Uber exec recently disclosed that the company knows when you are more likely to pay surge pricing. (It’s when your phone battery is just about to die.) But with a potential app change Uber is rolling out, this might not matter, because you probably won’t notice that surge is even in effect.

The app change, The Verge reports, would eliminate the blue-and-black circle that pops up before you hail a ride, letting you know that your trip will cost you two or three times what it usually does. On that screen, users also have to manually input the surge percentage, a sort of formal acknowledgement they know the ride will cost extra. (Like guac.)

Instead, now when you order a ride, you’ll see a set fare, a small line of text letting you know there’s an additional cost, and no second confirmation or indication of the surge multiplier.

Did you notice that especially evil bit there? It jacks up the rates when it knows that your battery is about to die?  That is deeply evil on a level  that buggers the mind:

Other than the company’s notoriously lax attitude about background checks, allegations of drivers kidnapping and raping riders, and that, um, interesting new logo, the worst thing about Uber is surge pricing. And, not surprisingly, the company has figured out exactly when you are more likely to pay double or triple the cost of your ride: when your phone battery is low.

This is a company with a multi-billion dollar valuation, which means that this is a company that our society (or at least our financial system) lionizes.

This is a particularly searing indictment of the values we hold as a society.