With nothing better to do, I decided I would go to work and apply my own amateur internet sleuthing skills to this problem. I've already seen this done on several exciting spy movies.
I decided to start with the female suspect. Take a look at the image below.
First off, I would like to say that it strikes me as being a little bit strange that someone looking like this could get a mortgage in the first place. If I saw someone like this heading toward my cab I would be quickly contemplating evasive maneuvers. If escape was impossible I would definitely be asking for cash up front.
So I uploaded this image to Google's image search app to see if I could help the police out a bit. Man, did Google ever return a lot of possible suspects.
Some of them were easily dismissable because they were the wrong gender, or were dead.
Like this one,
I am sure that if I were to send this one to the cops I would probably get arrested for mischeif.
I think the same could be said about this suspect,
After closely examining the first thirty or so images, I was finally able to focus on one very suspicious looking character. This one is number ten in the list. No name is given for this individual but the artists states that it is a very recognizable person....
Now on to the second suspect in the crime.
I thought for sure that the second suspect would be easier to pin down, but I was wrong.
Curiously, these two guys showed up in the list....
and,
but they don't work for me. The first guy is too clean shaven and the second guy is hard to figure out because he is wearing a Halloween costume.
If I were really pressed, I would suggest they open an investigation into this guy,
or this guy,
or this guy,
but they all have solid alibis.
Tuesday, December 27, 2016
Uber Drivers are Refusing Short Fares!
An Uber driver sits airing his foot out the window. Making too much money?
I sense such bittersweet irony as I sit back and watch Uber Taxi stumble as it baby-steps into the realities of the industry it intends to dominate.
Going back a couple of years I recall the indignant calls to radio talk shows when every citizen who ever had an issue with a taxi driver would call in and air their grievances.
One of the common complaints involved the number of times passengers would approach the first taxi in a queue, only to be refused service if they were not going far enough. There was never any attempt to probe this issue in any depth to discover the cause of the problem.
The cause, by the way, in that case, was negligent government regulation. Specifically, the senseless issuance of licenses into a market that had long since passed the saturation point.
Uber was supposed to fix all of that.
Now that we have had a few years to study the evolution of this great new technology that Uber has invented, I.E. taxi service, we can see the exact same problems cropping up.
Go figger!
Uber Drivers Stiff Passengers After Finding Out Final Destination
Sounds suspiciously like the same old, same old, same old problem of drivers refusing fares in saturated markets, no?
Uber released a statement about the practice.
“Ridesharing apps are changing a transportation status quo that has been unequal for generations, making it easier and more affordable for people to get around, no matter where they live and where they're going."
Yes but, when it comes to the rough and tumble of taxi driving, nothing has changed. Nothing at all. It's still the same old business.
Uber is changing the transportation status quo that has been unequal for generations, and it is making it even more unequal. Instead of the thousands of taxi millionaires across the globe, Uber is creating a few taxi billionaires, all bearing a suspicious resemblance to the notorious 1% ers we've been hearing about at the top, and an army of hapless dupes working for peanuts at the bottom.
You have to wonder why so many of our politicians, who are always so keen to put on this front about how much they "care" about the underprivileged are, at this very time, turning themselves into pretzels in order to facilitate Uber Taxi's ambitious drive to take over the taxi industry.
"Get a ping and it says a grocery store. my gut says NOOOOOO uberfast, but I did it anyways.
Pick up a dude with a cart FULL of groceries. FULL!!!
Help him put sheet in my drunk and back seat, take 1.7km down the street. Help him unload sheet at his crib. 23 minutes and $4 later he says "thanks man, you cool B". No tip... dude spends $150 on groceries but can't drop an extra fin on his uber driver."
Reminds me of that old Mexican joke. "If you sheet on my bed, I keel you." Pardon me for being culturally insensitive right now.
One driver replies,
"I don't do grocery stores anymore for this reason. More specifically, Walmart and similar discount stores.
If you don't help them with groceries into the trunk and out of the trunk, you get 1 star, WTF? Would rather cancel and not make any money at all...."
Just like the old cab driver at the front of the queue. He would rather refuse a customer and not make any money at all.
"Park in parking lot, wait for 5 min, cancel no show. pax couldn't find the vehicle..."
Using this trick, the Uber driver collects a $5.00 "no show" fee for a passenger he deliberately avoids.
Yep. Uber is a technology company that knows sweet sheet all about the taxi business.
All of which goes to show that the problem is not restricted to Washington-area airports.
Oh sure, Uber can react by "deactivating" it's "self-employed" partners if they refuse to accept fares. This practice has been common in the "horse and buggy" cab business ever since I joined in 1977. Of course, they didn't use such high-tech terminology back then. They simply said, "You can't just pick and choose the trips you like. No more trips for you. You're parked."
Finally, this entry from a poor Uber sucker who bought into the schtick about this brand new technology called "ridesharing" only to discover that he was just a common taxi driver,
"I used to be a real go-getter love to drive,but after this xmass my spirit has finally been broken.Sick of people sneaking in food and beers.
I had a lady try to bring 5 kids in my car plus herself and I had to ask her if she was serious.
Then a family of four start sharing a bag of chips and leaving the crumbs all over my seat. Im not cut out as a teacher of respect."
He's not cut out as a taxi driver either.
I feel sorry for this poor woman.
First, she lets herself be taken advantage of by the Uber/Goldman Sachs et.al. gang. She burns up her own capital and pays Uber 20-25% of her earnings for the "privilege."
Talk about a new twist on the Marxist theory of labour being exploited by the owners of capital (thanks for that Jille,) this sucker allows herself to be exploited by a company that cons her into using her OWN CAPITAL to earn a subsidy for her mileage.
But just like the other heroic granny who completed an 800 mile round trip for a paltry $139, she probably does it just for the "adventure."
On top of that, she puts herself through all of this stress with the same criminal government that is playing both ends off against the middle.
I used to believe that sacrificing one's own life in idiotic wars for "one's country" was the ultimate in human stupidity.
But doing it to make Travis Kalanick and Goldman Sachs investors rich?
That's a whole new level of self-immolative insanity, like punching holes through your own flesh to attach jewelry.
Now that I have bored you with some of the complexities attending the Uber scam, I invite you to sit back and relax with something much more entertaining....
You kinda gotta expect it. I mean, superficially, there ought to be no statistical disparity between the number of small and independent taxi drivers and the number of corporate Uber taxi drivers who commit sexual assaults. Employees of both the politically favored Uber and the maligned incumbent taxi operators will often find themselves in the proximity of vulnerable people. Yet the news reports continue to stream in about Uber cabbies assaulting their customers.
Is it real? Or just an anomaly?
I see one significant difference, though, between Uber cabbies, and those who complied with government taxi industry mandates.
The average non-Uber taxi driver enters the trade as a means to a livelihood. He obtains a license. It costs him time and money. It becomes a thing of value to him. He doesn't want to take unnecessary risks by preying on, rather than serving, customers.
HE DOESN'T WANT TO LOSE HIS TAXI LICENSE.
The average Uber taxi driver, on the other hand, couldn't give a shit.
He doesn't have to get a license. All he has to do is fill out a form and provide a driver's license and proof of car ownership.
The average Uber driver is NOT MOTIVATED by the desire to make a living driving a cab. Just read the Uber driver forums, as I do. Other than the few bullshitters, and they have always been around in the cab business..... you know the guys who boast they make 2X or more of the average on any given night, most of the Uber cabbies are either whining about how little they earn, or boasting that they don't really do it for the money. They do it for fun and adventure, or to alleviate boredom on Friday nights, like the granny I wrote about a week ago, or so, who completed an 800 mile round trip for Uber for a lousy $139 which covers barely half of her vehicle costs for that trip, let alone providing her with anything approximating a wage.
She said it was worth it to her because of the "adventure."
So it gets down to some lonely Travis Bickle type maniac, suffering from severe akathisia, deciding to take the opportunity Uber offers him, to cruise the bar districts at times when the supply of vulnerable, attractive, and mostly young, women goes into *surge* mode.
I think this is where the equilibrium between the frequency of Uber cab drivers vs. incumbents will experience a nudge in the direction of a larger number of Uber cabbies committing sexual assaults.
Paul Bernardo would have loved Uber.
And perhaps what pisses me off the most about this is that the politicians who are responding in knee-jerk, gutless, spineless, opportunistic, and completely predictable fashion to facilitate Uber's drive for power and profit, seem blissfully unaware, or sociopathically unconcerned with the monster they are unleashing.
London Uber driver CHARGED with sexually assaulting passenger.
One final comment.
Whenever I hear some spineless, gutless, politician or bureaucrat say, "Well, we will have to see what is being done in OTHER JURISDICTIONS," in other words, classic passing of the buck, I want to
PUKE.
In their minds, obviously, it's not a question of right or wrong. It's about the cowardly security that can be experienced by creatures whose main survival technique consists of blending with the herd, like so many wildebeest or striped zebras.
And then, to make matters even worse, I can't help but think of the salaries these paragons of public virtue receive compared to the pittance that cab drivers earn.
PUKE
doesn't quite describe it.
More Uber news.
Uber is hiding everything it can from users and investors who deserve to know the facts
This is Uber's idea of effective public relations?
"Susie Heath, a spokesperson for Uber Canada, tells us they’ve worked with law enforcement agencies to help build a series of tips for consumers. (I.E. Uber customers.)
Tips include sitting in the back seat so you can easily exit the car in case of emergency, following your intuition, planning ahead by letting family & friends know where you are, giving Uber feedback and being respectful in your driver’s car."
Try to imagine any other corporation feeling the need to "work with law enforcement agencies" in order to protect the public from their own employees!
It might take the form of a large poster installed at every Walmart entrance.
Without Uber, I couldn't make this stuff up.
I mean, I can understand why some pharmaceutical companies might be required to inform the public that the use of their product might result in anal leakage, but, have standards dropped so low that companies now have to warn the public about the possibility of being raped by their employees?
Attention Walmart Shoppers. Beware of Walmart employees.
Tips include:
keep a safe distance between yourself and Walmart staff.
know where all of the exits are in case of an emergency. You never know when a Walmart employee might try to pull an Uber.
follow your intuition, whatever that is supposed to mean.
plan ahead by letting family and friends know you intend to go shopping at Walmart.
give Walmart feedback if you find yourself turning down the wrong aisle, only to be confronted by some sex-crazed Walmart employee offering you free merchandise in exchange for a blowjob. Remember, Walmart hires anyone who walks in the door as long as they have a driver's license and a car.
be respectful when visiting your friendly Walmart location. For example, don't vomit on the merchandise, in the aisles, or on fellow shoppers.
Walmart has been working with law enforcement to help build a series of tips for Walmart shoppers. This should make you feel very secure when visiting Walmart.
Walmart is all about sharing.
Please come again!
Is it just me? OR is it a brand new interpretation of the old warning, "Caveat emptor?"
Oh. And let's not forget the fact that the corporation that is now working with law enforcement to warn the public about using its own service was the same company that had the balls to rip its customers off with a "safe ride fee" that has magically morphed into a "booking fee," much like the fraud of Global Warming has morphed into "Climate Change."
"You don't believe in climate change? Let me guess, you probably don't believe in gravity either."
See also:
Thursday, December 15, 2016
What happens in a taxi, stays in a taxi. When you choose Uber, God is watching.
After Uber blew onto the scene I was stunned to experience something I never expected to happen. I found myself entirely at odds with my own home political movement, the libertarians.
I was called a "hypocrite," a "Luddite," and a "parasite," because I dared point out the fact that Uber did NOT represent a pivotal point in the libertarian battle for human freedom. While a majority of libertarians and free market conservatives were creaming their jeans over the Uber phenomenon, I was pointing out that Uber was NOT about deregulation of the taxi industry, but about changing the regulations in order to create a lop-sided, two-tiered regulatory system with a whole new set of rules designed to guaranty success to Uber and failure to every other taxi company.
For decades, I have experienced a growing disgust and loathing for politicians. My analysis reveals that most politicians are cowards and moral hypocrites. However, there was always an element of doubt in my mind. I have always felt compelled to leave a spot open in my mind for the possibility that my understanding of issues is not quite deep enough to be 100% certain that politicians are just a bunch of posturing phonies with the same old motives as everyone else.
Self-interest.
As I live and learn, I realize that I don't know enough about medical care, education, banking or climate science to be 100% confident of my impression of the dishonesty practiced by politicians.
But when it comes down to the taxi business, I can see what is being perpetrated with crystal clarity.
It would not be correct to say that most politicians in most Ontario jurisdictions have been bending over and spreading their ass cheeks in order to appease and accommodate Travis Kalanick because politicians NEVER spread their own ass-cheeks if they can find someone else's ass-cheeks to spread.
In a nutshell, this is how politicians handle most issues:
Lie (The law applies equally to everyone.)
Deflect (It's not about taxis, it's about technology.)
Spin (it's not a garage sale, it's the new "sharing economy.")
Distort (The taxi industry had decades to change its business model (even though the government mandates prevented it) and, taxis charge too much for their services (even though the government mandates their prices, as well.)
Sacrifice (others) (Oh jeez, look at all these people who are facing homelessness and poverty! How can "we" help them? Oh, let's get the taxpayers to pay.)
Pretend you care. (At least the Marxist-Leninists were somewhat honest with their slogan, "Make the Rich Pay!" Our modern politicians don't bother themselves with such triffles. "Make someone else pay!" is good enough.)
If you need proof, consider this:
It is not the politicians who are being reamed up the butt by Uber, it's the less politically powerful taxi operators.
So back to the questions of starry-eyed libertarians who embraced, en masse, this vile and corrupt political organism, there was one other voice from the libertarian side who saw Uber for what it is, right from the start.
Back in 1987 when I worked for the Du Pont Corporation, the company would compensate me for the cost of using my own vehicle at a rate of 25 cents per kilometer. That's equivalent to 40 cents per mile in Canadian dollars.
The equivalent in U.S. dollars at $1 CDN = $.75 U.S. would be about 30 cents, U.S. per mile.
Any decent company that asks its employees to use their personal cars for business will offer fair compensation for the use of that vehicle. Even the government offers compensation.
If Uber were to offer its employees fair compensation for the use of their own cars, at 1987 levels, this sweet li'l ol' granny should have received 794 X $.30 = $238 for the use of her car on this assignment. If she were to be paid for her 15.5 hours at, say, $7.00 per hour she would receive an additional $108.50.
That would achieve a grand total payout of $346.5.
Instead, she says she made about $9 per hour (=139.50) for her troubles after paying $32 for her own gas.
So, when the estimated cost of using her own vehicle (at $.30 per mile) is taken into account, her actual pay, if she were compensated fairly, would be her vehicle cost plus a wage. It would be $346.50. Instead, she claims that she got a paltry $139.00.
Now multiply that ripoff by the total number of Uber cabbies, and you begin to see where the Uber corporation could make some money for its rich investors. Except that it doesn't.
Now according to this sweet li'l ol' Uber granny,
“This was not lucrative,” she said. “I did it because it was an adventure.”
Yep.
Paying the Uber corporation 25% or so of the amount the customer pays for the use of your time and your automobile is one heck of an adventure.
Maybe Janis Rogers is willing to work for nothing in order to enrich Travis Kalinik and his investors because it is all just a great "adventure." I guess the subsidy she gets from Uber for the high-tech version of picking up hitch-hikers is just a kind of bonus.
I have used ballpark numbers for this analysis. I decided it was not worth the effort to go digging down into Google holes to collect more current data. Suffice it to say that the 25 cent per Km. payout I received from Du Pont in 1987 has gone up since then. Therefore, the situation for Janis is likely even worse than I have described.
Most of the time, when I am in my cab and an Uber driver is beside me, I notice with some amusement that they rarely make eye contact. It's as though they feel guilty in the knowledge of the damage they are doing to their legally straight jacketed competition.
The joke is on them.
This Just In
According to one of my sources, a taxi owner who was recently subjected to a mandatory City of Hamilton taxi inspection, was told he had to replace his vehicle, even though it had another year of useful life under the six-year bylaw limitation.
The reason?
Because the "check engine" light was glowing on the dash, and even AFTER the owner had had the issue resolved by a mechanic, he was STILL FORCED to replace the vehicle.
Not one Uber cab has undergone a similar inspection to date.
You would have thought that, given the City of Hamilton's disgusting abeyance of Hamilton's taxicab regulations in order to accommodate the Uber corporation, they would have, at least, eased up on their heavy handed treatment of the incumbent taxi operators.
You would have been wrong.
This is what bothers me most about the slime-handed way in which the City of Hamilton has handled the Uber issue. They relentlessly harass the incumbent operators while giving Uber a free pass.
"Every decent man is ashamed of the government he lives under." -- H. L. Mencken
At this point, I am quite proud of myself. I have managed to write another commentary on the morally questionable Uber corporation, and the ass-kissing of that same corporation that has been displayed by the equally morally corrupt government of the City of Hamilton without using ONE SINGLE EXPLETIVE.
"Made 9$ today in 3hours
I got three pings
One I took was 4.9
The two I skipped on were both pax under 4.4."
I have been predicting this outcome all along. I knew from the start that Uber's much-praised "business model" would result in misery and disaster for ALL cab drivers. Uber is NOT about technology and it is NOT about a free market revolution. It's about corporate manipulation of the taxi business via a broken political system.
Nothing has changed in the cab business since it was regulated in London in 1654.
In a free country, dominated by pure laissez-faire free markets, there would be plenty of alternative employment opportunities. Such huge disparities between the incomes of low-skilled, low investment employees, and the wages of the rest of the employed population, as we are now seeing happen to all cab drivers, whether they work for Uber or less politically privileged taxi brokers, would not exist.
Unfortunately, the economics of the taxi industry are not hermetically isolated from the wider economy. Limited opportunities in the wider economy, (A.K.A. - involuntary unemployment or under-employment) will result in a higher number of entrants into the taxi trade as would otherwise be the case.
The Trudeau government's decision to import more hundreds of thousands of potential cab drivers will only make the situation worse for those attempting to eke out a living in this industry. If you want to know whether federal immigration policy is bringing in too many, too few, or just the right number of people from third-world countries, all you need to do is observe the rate of change in the numbers of cab drivers and compare it with their average income performance.
The popular move toward increasing the minimum wage to $15 per hour will only serve to create even MORE taxi drivers as it destroys entry-level jobs, since minimum wages have not yet been imposed upon the taxi trade and the artificial surplus of labour will easily migrate into Uber, and Uber-like occupations, where employment has not been effectively prohibited by statute. This would suit the Uber corporation just fine since it will continue to extract it's 25% commission from the taxi-using public, regardless of whether there is a 10% surplus of cab drivers or a 2,000% surplus of cab drivers.
There is also the matter of resource deployment.
In Hamilton, before Uber was given the nod, there were 447 licensed taxis. Most of the time, these resources were only being utilized 25% of the time due to negligent regulatory policies. That was bad enough.
Now that the City of Hamilton has decided to give the Uber corporation an unlimited number of taxi licenses, the numbers of under-utilized private hire vehicles can be expected to vastly multiply. As if the City's backward-looking anti-car traffic philosophy hasn't caused enough gridlock, with it's attendant gaseous and particulate emissions, the doubling, tripling or who know's what multiple, of excess idle taxicabs can only make the situation worse.
I am just a simple cab driver. I am awed by the plethora of issues the decision-makers in the city government deal with. Such an endeavor far exceeds my own feeble abilities.
All I can confidently comment on is the city's traffic and road construction philosophy, and it's failure to effect a rational taxicab regulatory policy.
Sometimes, Hamilton's politicians strike me as having to be extremely intelligent, given the number of issues they deal with on a daily basis.
But when I consider the possibility that their incompetence in road policy and cab regulation may indeed infect all of the other areas in which they have been given public trust and authority, contemplation of the sheer enormity of the damage is truly disheartening.
It's a good thing we live in a country that still has enormous wealth. People don't pick up the pitchforks and grease up the guillotines until they are reduced to eating rats, shivering in the cold, and seeing their relatives dying in droves.
"What good fortune for governments that the people do not think." -- Adolf Hitler.
So long as there is sports on the TV and an ample supply of beer, they barely take the time to notice.
History has demonstrated that this could all change in a heartbeat.
"It is dead slow. I think i need to get up early. There is nothing during the day after rush hour." -- source, UberPeople.NET.
