Sexual harassment, corporate-espionage charges, taking advantage of drivers: The company that practically courts bad PR has an even greater, more existential dilemma.
In early March, Travis Kalanick, the 40-year-old CEO of Uber, was riding in an SUV to Palo Alto for the company’s Technology Day, thinking about how to help Uber survive one of the worst periods a corporation had ever experienced. In January, some 500,000 users had joined a campaign to #DeleteUber from their phones, in response to the company’s perceived lack of support for protests at JFK against the Trump administration’s immigration ban (Kalanick had recently joined Trump’s economic council), which seemed to underscore the long-standing view that Uber didn’t care much for its drivers. The deletions were still coming three weeks later when Susan Fowler, a female engineer who’d left the company, accused it of rampant sexism and sexual harassment. Then, over the next two weeks, Google sued Uber, alleging it had stolen the company’s self-driving-car technology; a video surfaced of Kalanick getting into a profane argument with a driver; and the New York Times revealed that Uber had moved into cities where it was not allowed to operate with the help of a tool called Greyball. (The program showed government officials a fake version of Uber’s app with “ghost cars” so its drivers couldn’t be apprehended.)
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Early and Often: David Freedlander - Momentum vs. Machine The Trump and Harris campaigns battle it out for every last vote.
WIth two weeks left to go, the contours of the 2024 presidential election are clear: Both campaigns need voters who usually don’t vote, and Kamala Harris needs to bring the Democratic coalition, including its Trump-curious members, back home.While the Republican side plans to spend the remaining days of the contest trying to lure low-propensity voters to the polls, the Harris team will attempt to persuade voters of color to return to its side and will try to increase numbers among white voters in previously red suburbs.
Drowning in Slop - A thriving underground economy is clogging the internet with AI garbage-and it's only going to get worse.
SLOP started seeping into Neil Clarke's life in late 2022. Something strange was happening at Clarkesworld, the magazine. Clarke had founded in 2006 and built into a pillar of the world of speculative fiction. Submissions were increasing rapidly, but “there was something off about them,” he told me recently. He summarized a typical example: “Usually, it begins with the phrase ‘In the year 2250-something’ and then it goes on to say the Earth’s environment is in collapse and there are only three scientists who can save us. Then it describes them in great detail, each one with its own paragraph. And then—they’ve solved it! You know, it skips a major plot element, and the final scene is a celebration out of the ending of Star Wars.” Clarke said he had received “dozens of this story in various incarnations.”
The City Politic- The Other Eric Adams Scandal The NYPD shot a fare evader, a cop, and two bystanders. He defends it.
On Sunday, September 15, Derell Mickles hopped a turnstile, got asked to leave by cops, then entered the subway again ten minutes later through an emergency exit. This was at the Sutter Avenue L station, out by his mother's house, five stops from the end of the line. Police said they noticed he was holding a folded knife. They followed him up the stairs to the elevated train, asking him 38 times to drop the weapon.
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