{"id":185725,"date":"2014-08-27T20:26:00","date_gmt":"2014-08-28T01:26:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2014\/08\/27\/stupid-uber-tricks\/"},"modified":"2014-08-27T20:26:00","modified_gmt":"2014-08-28T01:26:00","slug":"stupid-uber-tricks","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2014\/08\/27\/stupid-uber-tricks\/","title":{"rendered":"Stupid Uber Tricks"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>It has been revealed that <a href=\"http:\/\/www.theverge.com\/2014\/8\/26\/6067663\/this-is-ubers-playbook-for-sabotaging-lyft\">Uber has been mounting a sophisticated program of industrial sabotage against their rival Lyft<\/a>:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p><span style=\"color: blue;\">Uber is arming teams of independent contractors with burner phones and credit cards as part of its sophisticated effort to undermine Lyft and other competitors. Interviews with current and former contractors, along with internal documents obtained by The Verge, outline the company\u2019s evolving methods. Using contractors it calls &#8220;brand ambassadors,&#8221; Uber requests rides from Lyft and other competitors, recruits their drivers, and takes multiple precautions to avoid detection. The effort, which Uber appears to be rolling out nationally, has already resulted in thousands of canceled Lyft rides and made it more difficult for its rival to gain a foothold in new markets. Uber calls the program &#8220;SLOG,&#8221; and it\u2019s a previously unreported aspect of the company\u2019s ruthless efforts to undermine its competitors.<\/span><br \/><span style=\"color: blue;\"><br \/><\/span><span style=\"color: blue;\">Together, the interviews and documents show the lengths to which Uber will go to halt its rivals\u2019 momentum. The San Francisco startup has raised $1.5 billion in venture capital, giving it an enormous war chest with which to battle Lyft and others. While the company\u2019s cutthroat nature is well documented, emails from Uber managers offer new insight into the shifting tactics it uses to siphon drivers away from competitors without getting caught. It also demonstrates the strong interest Uber has taken in crushing Lyft, its biggest rival in ridesharing, which is in the midst of a national expansion.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>This kind of crap is why Uber, Lyft, and their ilk need to be required to actually have employees with hack licenses drive their cars.<\/p>\n<p>What happens if Uber, a company that employs price gouging as a significant portion of its business model, actually becomes the 800 pound gorilla in the commercial personal transport market?<\/p>\n<p>It won&#8217;t be pretty, it will make Comcast look like Mother Theresa.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>It has been revealed that Uber has been mounting a sophisticated program of industrial sabotage against their rival Lyft: Uber is arming teams of independent contractors with burner phones and credit cards as part of its sophisticated effort to undermine Lyft and other competitors. Interviews with current and former contractors, along with internal documents obtained &hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1005,970,1035],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-185725","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-business","category-corruption","category-transportation"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/185725"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=185725"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/185725\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=185725"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=185725"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=185725"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}