I mean, it’s not quite that simple, is it? Did they do everything they could to make drivers and passengers safe? Or did they put profits over people’s safety?
From the article:
> internal company documents […] showing that Uber had flagged her ride as a higher risk for a serious safety incident moments before she was picked up. Uber never warned her […]
Uber actually had a whole project that produced systems that determine the risk of incidents happening. Could they make rides safer but chose not to? That’s at the core of these lawsuits.
Interesting. When it's the state I think the overwhelming opinion is that predictive policing is dangerous but when it's a private company we actually want it to enforce it?
They could not be held accountable to warn her if they had not done the analysis. They did. Their organizational conclusion was that it was potentially an unsafe trip. Shit, they could have just cancelled the ride dynamically and re-assigned her. Why wouldn’t they do that? It’d probably be more expensive. Maybe they’d get more cancelled rides. Maybe this woman wouldn’t have been raped by an agent of Uber selected for and sent to her by them.
It depends. Are the inputs to the algorithm themselves discriminatory? If so, then yes that would be appropriate. But that is a different conversation. They determined the passenger may be unsafe and did nothing.
Mind you, these companies work very hard for us to not know how they match A to B, usually so we don’t notice things like their disregard for safety.
The inputs wouldn’t even matter; the inputs could even be above reproach but if there were disparate impacts in terms of outcomes, the case for liability could be made.
Oof, this sounds like a case where executives/management who knew about this tool and didn't act upon it should be charged with accessory-to-crime. There has got to be a moral imperative to act upon tools like this.
I agree. I wish it would tell me the password, there is a good chance I could identify the service that it came from based on the password. This way it doesn’t feel that useful.
I think ‘a leading member’ is underselling it a little. He is the “Fraktionsvorsitzender”, which is comparable to the majority leader in the US Senate.
> which is comparable to the majority leader in the US Senate.
Not really. First of all, Jens Spahn doesn't lead a majority, he merely leads his party's parliamentary group, which has 208 of 630 seats. Second, he has already proven this year that he doesn't have the members of his own parliamentary group under control, so his stance on a matter should not be taken for more than it is.
> Made of polystyrene and with an internal steel skeleton,
They weight 1.2 tons total. If they are made of polystyrene and steel, it stands to reason that a significant part of the 1.2 tons is contributed by the steel.
Random fact: Those starters are a plot point in the 1965 film The Flight of the Phoenix, where the protagonists are trying to start a plane that’s stranded in the Sahara, but only have a small supply of starter cartridges left.
Yep! For those reasons, it was more or less the "default" target for assembly programs without special requirements. So much so that even as a child I knew "SYS49152" ($C000 in decimal) by heart.
Basic interpreter used $a000 to $c000 if I remember correctly, and screen buffer characters was at $400. If you didn’t need to display anything you could use it for something else.
Wikipedia explains it as "an activity done by individuals to protect themselves from possible subsequent criticism, legal penalties, or other repercussions, usually in a work-related or bureaucratic context."[1]
Last time I ordered some lithium primary batteries from Amazon it came with the lithium sticker. I didn't look into the rules.
Lithium poses two risks:
1) The internal resistance is low enough that if it's shorted it can go into thermal runaway. This is the risk they had in mind when saying no loose cells (but note that cells merely need to be securely contained, not specifically in a device.)
2) Secondary cells can grow whiskers inside the cell. If a whisker grows just wrong it can short the cell from inside and drive it into runaway. This is the risk that they are worried about here--and it's a legitimate risk, it's brought a plane down.
The reason the rules are different in the passenger compartment is that while there's nothing on board an airplane that can fight a lithium fire it's generally a small, weak fire (the big e-bike batteries that have been in some rather dramatic videos aren't allowed) that humans can generally keep from turning into a big fire. But if nobody can fight the fire you have a big problem. Hence why lost phones are treated very differently--they could have fallen someplace where the fire wouldn't be fought.
They are more dangerous. They contain significant amounts of lithium metal, the thing that bursts into flames when in contact with water. There are similar restrictions on them for air travel.
From the article:
> internal company documents […] showing that Uber had flagged her ride as a higher risk for a serious safety incident moments before she was picked up. Uber never warned her […]
Uber actually had a whole project that produced systems that determine the risk of incidents happening. Could they make rides safer but chose not to? That’s at the core of these lawsuits.
reply