I feel like the Rand stuff was shoe-horned in to make the title fit. It's a shame, because there are a lot of good points about Uber's New York plans in there.
What you're talking about doesn't quite apply here- the laws are outdated, yes- the NYC taxi commission themselves agreed with that. But they were bound by contracts until February 2013 that meant they were unable to change the rules. Uber/Travis pushed ahead with their plans anyway, assuming that the powers that be would buckle.
That's stupid. And they're using being "disruptive" as an excuse for ignoring legal realities- and because they slap the label "disruptive" on it, plenty of people back them up. If I was an investor I would be pretty damn annoyed at what must be a lot of wasted cash on this endeavor, when anyone that bothered to investigate would have realised that failure was inevitable.
If you read further, it discusses how Uber basically screwed over yellow cab drivers by urging them to break existing rules, then ambushed them to try and retrieve the iPhones they gave out once they'd given up on the service. Make no mistake- Uber will have an extremely difficult time re-launching their UberTAXI product in NYC now that they've alienated cab drivers.
I feel like the Rand stuff was shoe-horned in to make the title fit
Not really. It is just buried in the long article (probably too deep).
TL;DR: he likes Rand, has the cover of one of her books as his Twitter avatar, and defends her ideas on the web.
The passage:
From an interview with the Washington Post:
“WP: I noticed your Twitter avatar is the cover of Ayn Rand’s “The Fountainhead.”
Kalanack: I don’t know what you’re talking about. [Laughs.] It’s less of a political statement. It’s just personally one of my favorite books. I’m a fan of architecture.”
See. Not a political statement. He’s just a fan of architecture. And one can only assume, then, that it was a completely different Travis Kalanick who responded to the Mahalo question “How would Ayn Rand react to the current policies and realities in the USA?” thusly…
One of the interesting stats I came across was that 50% of all California taxes are paid by 141,000 people (a state with 30mm inhabitants). This hit home as I had recently finished Atlas Shrugged. If 141,000 affluent people in CA went “on strike”, CA would be d
one for… another reason you can’t keep increasing taxes to pay for unaccountable gov’t programs that offer poor services.
Rand is just code for telling mindless anti-intellectuals to hate somebody. Hence the references to Paul Ryan and the Tea Party.
The fact of the matter is, on many occasions Paul Carr simply lies about what Rand said.
If Rand is so bad that someone should be embarrassed to be associated with her ideas--- why the need to lie about her ideas?
I'll answer that to you-- Rand's real crime is she demolish leftist anti-intellectualism and showed it for what it is.
It's not Rand they hate, its the mind. And their whole goal is to prevent you from being exposed to the ideas in Atlas Shrugged (which is why they focus on Rand, rather than the book, they don't even mention the book unless they have to and never the philosophy.)
"If Rand is so bad ..." the problem is that most people haven't read Rand, even so called "adherents" and "fans", and so they don't know what the heck they're talking about. the few people that have can see through the bull.
What you're talking about doesn't quite apply here- the laws are outdated, yes- the NYC taxi commission themselves agreed with that. But they were bound by contracts until February 2013 that meant they were unable to change the rules. Uber/Travis pushed ahead with their plans anyway, assuming that the powers that be would buckle.
That's stupid. And they're using being "disruptive" as an excuse for ignoring legal realities- and because they slap the label "disruptive" on it, plenty of people back them up. If I was an investor I would be pretty damn annoyed at what must be a lot of wasted cash on this endeavor, when anyone that bothered to investigate would have realised that failure was inevitable.
If you read further, it discusses how Uber basically screwed over yellow cab drivers by urging them to break existing rules, then ambushed them to try and retrieve the iPhones they gave out once they'd given up on the service. Make no mistake- Uber will have an extremely difficult time re-launching their UberTAXI product in NYC now that they've alienated cab drivers.