All: I think it's time to note that semantic arguments about the word "racism" are always the same and always turn nasty in the same way. That makes them off-topic here, as are canned arguments in general: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que.... They keep discussion stuck in superficial and uninteresting places, and that's the opposite of what HN is for. Curious conversation means exchanging new information.
But there’s an effort to redefine racism to include any policy that acknowledges race, as opposed to the normal definition that holds a policy is racist if it promotes the superiority of one race over another.
Semantic arguments are bad when they obscure and distract from the central point. But they are good when the distinction at issue is important to the issue at hand. In this case, the distinction is critical. In a world where widespread racism exists, but policies are not allowed to acknowledge race, then policy cannot address racism, thus it continues.
> ...keep discussion stuck in superficial and uninteresting places...
Sigh
Leaves me with so little hope. I guess we get to go around and around again on all this.
Setting aside the obvious PR opportunism, how would something like this actually work? Does Uber currently collect data on the race of the people who own restaurants they deliver from? Is data like this publicly available somehow? Is this data something they're going to start collecting to facilitate this feature? Does that sound like data it would be good for Uber to have?
Knowing what we know about Uber this all seems highly problematic.
I wonder how this will work from a legal point of view. This is a blatant, obvious example of racism, they aren't even attempting to be subtle about it.
While a wonderful gesture, something about this feels a bit... tangential to the real issue to me in a way that's distracting. Am I off base here? It feels like it's leaning toward opportunistic.
It's virtue signaling 100% from a corporation. But w/e.
I won't consider Uber to be "good corporate citizen" for it. But it helps a bunch of small restaurants in a time period where margins are tight so net positive maybe?
At least they're putting money down on it vs just issuing some statement.
It is interesting to see the responses here as opposed to this thread where pointing out that a company having diversity targets means they are explicitly not hiring based on performance (not just measuring who they have hired based on demographics of who has applied, and not mentioning race at all) ends up with multiple people agreeing that I'm a 'racist bad person'
Reverse racism is a dull, simplistic and naive, and implementing it at the business level is illegal and likely unhelpful on a systemic level, not to mention that people don't spend their money based on the demographics of the company who made a product. Race also isn't the only protected class, no one seems to be mentioning women, people closer to retirement age or veterans.
I would be more impressed if uber set up offices in poorer areas regardless of demographics or lobbied for schools to have more uniform funding regardless of their neighborhood. Maybe they could have small business courses at their offices or teach people about car maintenance.
At a previous employer I once received a company-wide email from their operations manager about "fixing" their TrustPilot score (which was low and totally justified) and how he was encouraging us to leave reviews with our opinions "as a user" despite us being employees (I raised concerns but those fell on deaf ears).
I don't understand how an e-mail like that can even be written. Even if they don't follow through with the action, if that email were to leak it will become a (justified) PR disaster for the company (said company already had a PR disaster a few months before). I might expect a clueless intern to send it out, but not an experienced operations manager. Worse, none of the CS & marketing employees saw anything wrong with that and actually went ahead and posted reviews in their name.
Management just doesn't have any particular skill at not generating flagrantly illegal ideas. I once saw a guy announce in a company-wide email that he was leading an initiative to help the recruiting team bucket incoming applications by gender. I strongly suspect that whoever approved this program is currently being yelled at by their legal department.
How do companies find out personal details like race about who runs a business (and actually do it accurately)?
Can they also find out things like religion or ethnicity?
Whether it’s corporate data collection or users checking a box, it seems like a good intention that is primed for manipulation - which I guess some companies might gloss over as long as it benefits them.
If anyone is interested, here's an interview with a human rights lawyer Robert Barnes, a man that has litigated wrongful death cases against police, and supreme court cases.
Very pertinent, internal take on the courts, BLM, Antifa, police, Covid, and current cases before the supreme court.
I’m Black and I am very uneasy about this move. I can’t figure out why. I think I would be more comfortable if they had some type of “economic empowerment Zone” that just happened to cover majority/minority communities. It wouldn’t be perfect, but it would just feel better to me.
I don't get how this solves anything, regardless of the legal or racist accusations already discussed.
The aim is to surface black-owned restaurants. But the solution is to remove the delivery for those restaurants. Do they have a filter for restaurants with no delivery fee? Are they also tagging the restaurants to make it obvious which are in this scheme?
Secondly, how do you determine which restaurants qualify? Is it just applied to independent businesses or is it something larger chains can game as well? It seems full of holes at the foundation.
The whole thing screams of a marketing department that think they should do _something_ to make it look like they're supporting protests but put in the tiniest amount of effort they could manage.
A version of this is used in india to reduce wages. When you divide people into two big groups and compensate one - you create unequal net wage - and if there is not enough employment, one group hogs all the jobs while others have to significantly reduce their wages to compete.
This is disgusting virtue-signaling from an awful company.
If Uber really wanted to help the Black community (and other minorities) how about actually treating their delivery drivers (a lot of which come from low-class backgrounds and part of minorities) fairly with decent wages and benefits?
How about a fair, transparent fee structure? As others have pointed out, the delivery fee is just one of many fees, the rest of which are conveniently hidden from the user and passed onto the restaurants which have no choice but to pay them because Uber Eats is one of a handful of delivery services and they're all equally scummy.
How about decent customer service that plays fair when things go wrong instead of fobbing the customer off and hope they don't do a chargeback? (not many people do which is why they get away with it)
I recommend all users of Uber eats and co read some of the large subreddits for gig economy and uber eats workers on reddit. It’s pretty telling just how awful these companies are... and though it’s still relatively new these announcements for affirmative action are leading to a lot of pushback that some would identify as hurting the cause rather then helping it.
Uber has been sending me invalid coupons through SMS for over a year now. A couple months ago I got fed up with it and decided to contact support, and they refused to even engage with the subject. I think it takes a lot to provide customer service worse than Google's, and they somehow managed to do it.
[+] [-] dang|5 years ago|reply
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
[+] [-] jmull|5 years ago|reply
But there’s an effort to redefine racism to include any policy that acknowledges race, as opposed to the normal definition that holds a policy is racist if it promotes the superiority of one race over another.
Semantic arguments are bad when they obscure and distract from the central point. But they are good when the distinction at issue is important to the issue at hand. In this case, the distinction is critical. In a world where widespread racism exists, but policies are not allowed to acknowledge race, then policy cannot address racism, thus it continues.
> ...keep discussion stuck in superficial and uninteresting places...
Sigh
Leaves me with so little hope. I guess we get to go around and around again on all this.
[+] [-] bww|5 years ago|reply
Knowing what we know about Uber this all seems highly problematic.
[+] [-] Nextgrid|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kepler1|5 years ago|reply
And, will they do this for other minorities when they suffer discrimination at the hands of the state? How about poor people?
"The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race."
[+] [-] unknown|5 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] lucasyvas|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ThrowawayBandit|5 years ago|reply
This is a corporate PR stunt that has nothing to do with anything and that perpetuates racial discrimination.
This is awful.
[+] [-] kmfrk|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] denago|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] HaloZero|5 years ago|reply
I won't consider Uber to be "good corporate citizen" for it. But it helps a bunch of small restaurants in a time period where margins are tight so net positive maybe?
At least they're putting money down on it vs just issuing some statement.
[+] [-] BiteCode_dev|5 years ago|reply
And we can enjoy the bright side of it, while not being naive.
[+] [-] CyberDildonics|5 years ago|reply
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23433335
Reverse racism is a dull, simplistic and naive, and implementing it at the business level is illegal and likely unhelpful on a systemic level, not to mention that people don't spend their money based on the demographics of the company who made a product. Race also isn't the only protected class, no one seems to be mentioning women, people closer to retirement age or veterans.
I would be more impressed if uber set up offices in poorer areas regardless of demographics or lobbied for schools to have more uniform funding regardless of their neighborhood. Maybe they could have small business courses at their offices or teach people about car maintenance.
[+] [-] kburman|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Nextgrid|5 years ago|reply
I don't understand how an e-mail like that can even be written. Even if they don't follow through with the action, if that email were to leak it will become a (justified) PR disaster for the company (said company already had a PR disaster a few months before). I might expect a clueless intern to send it out, but not an experienced operations manager. Worse, none of the CS & marketing employees saw anything wrong with that and actually went ahead and posted reviews in their name.
[+] [-] SpicyLemonZest|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] anm89|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] siruncledrew|5 years ago|reply
Can they also find out things like religion or ethnicity?
Whether it’s corporate data collection or users checking a box, it seems like a good intention that is primed for manipulation - which I guess some companies might gloss over as long as it benefits them.
[+] [-] jungletime|5 years ago|reply
Very pertinent, internal take on the courts, BLM, Antifa, police, Covid, and current cases before the supreme court.
https://youtu.be/6SSse90R72o?t=4021
[+] [-] lern_too_spel|5 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] scarface74|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|5 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] devit|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] onei|5 years ago|reply
The aim is to surface black-owned restaurants. But the solution is to remove the delivery for those restaurants. Do they have a filter for restaurants with no delivery fee? Are they also tagging the restaurants to make it obvious which are in this scheme?
Secondly, how do you determine which restaurants qualify? Is it just applied to independent businesses or is it something larger chains can game as well? It seems full of holes at the foundation.
The whole thing screams of a marketing department that think they should do _something_ to make it look like they're supporting protests but put in the tiniest amount of effort they could manage.
[+] [-] noxer|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kirykl|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] searchableguy|5 years ago|reply
This is just capitalism in action.
[+] [-] unknown|5 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] maest|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|5 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] alkibiades|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] atlantacrackers|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|5 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] Nextgrid|5 years ago|reply
If Uber really wanted to help the Black community (and other minorities) how about actually treating their delivery drivers (a lot of which come from low-class backgrounds and part of minorities) fairly with decent wages and benefits?
How about a fair, transparent fee structure? As others have pointed out, the delivery fee is just one of many fees, the rest of which are conveniently hidden from the user and passed onto the restaurants which have no choice but to pay them because Uber Eats is one of a handful of delivery services and they're all equally scummy.
How about decent customer service that plays fair when things go wrong instead of fobbing the customer off and hope they don't do a chargeback? (not many people do which is why they get away with it)
[+] [-] tmpz22|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Kaze404|5 years ago|reply