Yes, this is just standard bureaucracy and it's Skip's fault, as people are saying.
But the bigger point is that the SF government apparently places more weight on minor application mistakes than actual, historical "bad" behavior.
That's why this is so comical. It only feeds fuel to the truth that rules should be bent and there really is no point in "moving slow" for startups. You won't be rewarded for it. Most tech entrepreneurs already know this: Airbnb and Uber proved this point long ago.
> But the bigger point is that the SF government apparently places more weight on minor application mistakes than actual, historical "bad" behavior.
This has been my experience with pretty much any bureaucracy, regardless of locale. E.g. when I incorporated my company, I had to send in the same application four times, each time paying an additional fee. Reason was I had minor, pointless really, mistakes in the application, a box I didn't realize had to be ticked, name in the date field and date in the name field, that sort of thing. The data entry people at the government agency could have easily resolved any mistakes with a phone call, but instead I get a letter in the mail a couple of weeks later, saying there's an error but not what the error is. So I have to call and ask, and of course they had no record of what the error was so we had to go over the application on the phone and find them. You'd think they'd tell me about the other errors then, but no, I had to do this four times. It took almost two months to get a simple form approved.
I wish that was my only story of wasting time on bureaucracy, but there are plenty more where that came from.
This has been my experience with pretty much any bureaucracy, regardless of locale.
It doesn't have to be this way.
I incorporated my first company in Chicago, and was stunned with how helpful the bureaucrats were.
Yes, it was a little complex, especially in the years before "startups" were a thing, and you could do stuff online. But each department I had to work with had people who would sit me down at their desk and explain what they did, why I should care, and how to fill out the forms properly.
Maybe the difference is that back then, you were expected to form a company in person, and not do everything online all by yourself and be an expert from day one.
A massive thanks to the Illinois Department of Revenue people in the basement of the Thompson Center for all their openness and hand-holding.
(In spite of all this, I still moved the company to another state a few years later because of Chicago + Illinois taxes and corruption.)
Echo this sentiment from another Midwesterner, ex-pat former New York State resident. I moved to Indiana and have not had the experience of incorporating a business entity, but the experience I had at the Indiana Bureau of Motor Vehicles has been one to make me question whether bureaucracies are really necessarily horrible all of the time.
Starting with the experience of moving to the state, to contrast (Upstate) Western New York vs Indiana:
My New York insurance provider determined that I was no longer residing in the state, so mailed me a letter of notice that my vehicle insurance was being cancelled. In truth this was the best thing that could have happened, because Indiana insurance is so much cheaper, and I got a deal through my new employer. I was dragging my feet on this because I did not know better about it, and knew it would be painful. So I went to get new insurance, and learned I would need to re-register my car...
Visiting the Indiana BMV was like no other auto vehicle registration experience. They were able to take care of me same day, and with no long wait – I waited up to at most 15 minutes to the desk. I was not shuffled from one desk to another, we completed the process in a single desk visit. On the other hand...
New York requires you to surrender your plates when you leave the state. If you fail to surrender in a timely fashion, you will be fined punitively. Indiana has no such requirement, they trust you to destroy the plates when you drop a registration for a vehicle. In fact, when I brought plates for my second vehicle to the BMV to surrender them, as the lease was being grounded, not only did they let me know that they actually don't do that at all, I don't need to do that, but also that I was entitled to a credit for the portion of my registration that I had not used (which is fairly substantial, as it is based on the worth of the vehicle and paid annually, like a use tax.)
The desk attendant was able to help me fill that form out before I left, and about 45 days later, two checks came in the mail. Being from New York, I found this kind of experience at a bureaucracy to be quite pleasant and seemingly impossible, (and from what I hear asking people who are born and raised here, it has only just become this way recently because of many reforms that have been applied in the past 20 years.)
I live in Indiana, and incorporated about 3 weeks ago. Took me about 20 minutes, and I've never done it before. I had to use a unique company name, and that check could only be done in the Indiana Secretary General's office. 3 days later, I receive an email of congratulations. The next day, I get my physical paperwork.
I was making a LLC, so it was pretty straightforward and no surprises.
Once the SecGen approved it, getting IRS numbers was a whole 5 minutes. I also wish to sell things on Kickstarter/Indiegogo, so I applied for indiana tax numbers as well. $20 for 2 years.
I've had the same experience you've had but with different states than you. IMO it all comes down to a difference in attitude of the people of the state. In some states people generally expect the government to serve the people and of course the pool of people from which the government is staffed is drawn from the state so the government reflects these values. In some states the government is expected to serve its own interested and when you staff a government with people with those expectations that's exactly what you get. If you just throw up your hands at bad government like it's something unchanging to be taken for granted then that's exactly what you'll get.
If it was simply a population problem, then why do long-time residents tell me that it wasn't always this way?
Specific reforms intentionally undertaken to solve known problems with the system, made the system work better.
As a life-long New York resident until about 4 years ago, I can also tell you that I probably wouldn't disagree if you told me you thought this was "not possible in New York."
(And intuitively I'd say, it's not because of population numbers, but I can't put my finger on exactly what it is. There is a different mindset, whatever causes it I can't say, but I noticed immediately when I moved here, I still tell folks this place really just isn't like New York.)
To elaborate a bit more, I felt like part of the New York mindset was basically psychologically planning oneself around not getting robbed. There were plenty of ways to get robbed that people just don't worry about around here (and some of this can surely be attributed to population issues.) I'm not just talking about general common-sense things like making sure that valuables are not left visible in your unlocked, parked car. I mean up to and everything including neighborhoods which don't have enough driveway space for everyone in large duplex houses to park their cars, where the streets are marked for opposite-side alternate day parking.
So I don't have a private place to park my car at my rented house, and I have to park on the street, but I can't park my car on the street and leave it for 48 hours time without getting a ticket. This makes sense in Upstate New York as a condition required for Winter road maintenance, so that plows can get in and clear the snow off of the road. Only it's not just a condition required at Winter time, and when you point this out, people just accept it and say something like "yeah, well, they gotta make their money somehow..."
Which means 5x the tax base (more, because NY has ~33% higher per capita income, although that also implies employees are more expensive), which could be used to hire 5x the employees. Surely there isn't some law that says a state's DMV must have exactly N employees regardless of the size of the state?
All DMVs are evil. Indiana is like a flag of convenience for car registration, they are focused on their revenue generation.
A place like New York or Illinois is stuck dealing with all of the bullshit generated in New York City or Chicago. Registration and titles are impossible as a reaction to the industry the popped up in the 90s “laundering” stolen cars by swapping in salvage titles. Same deal with rings of people who’d purposefully cause accidents to defraud insurance companies for phony medical procedures.
It’s even worse with trucks, where there is a complex web of federal, state and local regulations, which scummy operators are good at exploiting.
This has been my experience in dealing with the German collection office even though all had already been moved to web and I never once met a real person. They would always send me nice letters explaining what exactly was wrong. Even did this in cases in which they themselves corrected the error on my behave.
On the other hand, dealing with private bureaucracies such as internet providers has always been a major pain. Very unhelpful, not accommodating at all.
Incorporating a company is a trivial matter as far as bureaucratic exercises go.
It's like the cover charge at the bar of bureaucratic suffering. Generally it's what follows that becomes painful, depending on the business you're in and how large/active/complicated it grows to be if at all.
I incorporated my first company as a teen, following instructions from a book in the local public library. I don't remember it requiring more than filling out and mailing some forms in.
The point is, you're not talking about getting a business license in a major city, or say... a liquor license, or like in TFA, a permit to be a newfangled e-scooter company - a context already embroiled in controversy.
You're just doing rubber-stamp "so he/she wants to be a corporation and pay taxes and employment security overheads, quarterly filings, and give us opportunities to bring on the hurt in the future, Sure thing!" kind of crap.
Bureaucracy values consistency over all else. People are held accountable for not following the process, not for customer experience.
That means either training people to be experts in whatever they are doing or removing agency from the individuals in the system.
Having people with the right training, etc is obviously the better path, but it costs more. End of the day, this is why devops is a thing — traditional IT operations only does what it does, which is a problem when you’re changing and growing.
This. The opposite of bureaucracy slavishly following process usually is not good customer experience but corruption. If you open the pandora's box of following process being optional, usually the person with cash in hand wins.
This obviously isn't an excuse for dump or inefficient processes, though.
I made a mistake on my federal tax return some years ago and to my great surprise the IRS turned out to be super-easy to deal with. They told me the amount at issue in the notification letter, a human answered the answered the phone and was able to explain the mistake in a couple of minutes, and they gave me a comfortable window to pay them back. As it only involved a few hundred dollars and it was very much my mistake (a careless math error as opposed to being about interpretation of the rules) it's easy to feel positive about it, but I'd rather talk to the IRS for 15 minutes a week than ever call Comcast again about anything.
> This has been my experience with pretty much any bureaucracy, regardless of locale
In my country (NZ) you can incorporate a country online in an hour. You will need to scan or fax your consent to be a director/shareholder forms though.
Likewise, I can update my income details for family tax credits etc. online with the IRD, our income tax system is very simple (sometimes referred to as pure) so I've never needed to file a tax return.
I apply for hunting permits on government land online, and when I change address, I'm required to notify the Police as a registered firearms holder, which I do online, they then email me asking me to document my secure firearms storage, I email them a brief description and some photos, and then based on that, they decide whether or not to send out a Police Officer to confirm.
I renew my car's registration online when emailed that it's due. On the odd occasion when I've gotten a speeding fine, I pay that online also.
It's really all about complexity of legislation, and administrative desire to minimise red tape. Our government, fortunately, in the more important areas, has made active endeavours to reduce legislative complexity, and red tape.
Funnily enough, I hit a lot more bureaucracy dealing with large companies, than our government.
As a general rule that is particularily effective when dealing with government is that it is always easier to ask forgiveness than it is to ask permission.
Government officials will always choose the easiest path forward - and that is almost always inaction.
Regardless of locale or public vs private entity. Trying to get customer service at many big name corps is a Kafkaesque experience. This is generally a fundamental human problem with how groups interact with outsiders to that group.
The reason why I am asking is because as a EU citizen, my experience is that that bureaucracy in northern europe is very different from bureaucracy in southern europe.
Sure, It's not perfect anywhere, but framing this as a problem that can't be fixed, that it is equally bad everywhere is in my view not just wrong but actually harmful to society.
> Yes, this is just standard bureaucracy and it's Skip's fault, as people are saying.
This does not match with my experience.
Bureaucracies, like human being, vary greatly. I was able to incorporate in Colombia at the department of commerce four years ago barely speaking Spanish, in just a couple hours as the bureaucrats there were very helpful.
I've also tanked tens of thousands of dollars on lawyers and spent over a year trying to reconfigure my corporate structure in a way that seems fairly trivial to me in Canada.
The idea that all bureaucracies are inherently evil is a self-fulfilling prophecy imo.
Yes it is and, why not? If anyone ought to give any credibility to what you say on a subject, one needs to know your expertise and experience on the subject. Does that sound that fair enough?
And neither of those 2 pieces of information is normally compromise your privacy in any manner.
But the fact that you are so sensitive to this question of mine tells me a lot. Basically you are just a kid with little experience in the bid bad world. Why should anyone take you seriously on your experience with bureaucracies when others have an experience to the contrary?
(I was hoping that you are someone with experience on making a bureaucracy work consistently in one's favor, other's could use your expertise.)
People that defer too much respect to the state are at a disadvantage. What I mean by that is that some people will conclude "well that's the law! so don't break it" as opposed to looking at the consequences or seeing the relativity of the law, or the influence you can have on the law.
Many laws don't have a consequence.
Many laws were written by your rival.
Many laws have consequences that have nothing to do with closing your Series C which is a far greater incentive.
Disagreeing with this reality doesn't change the accuracy of this reality.
And it's important to remember that the state doesn't see the law this way. I guarantee that whoever wrote the application forms didn't think they were passing a law about filling in section A3; they just wanted information about safety, and the style guide for writing forms says they get that information by putting a lettered and numbered section.
> And it's important to remember that the state doesn't see the law this way.
Yes, it is important to remember that the state is imbued with power, and also in many areas they have discretion, so if you want something discretionary from the state you need to
maintain a relationship with them or leverage.
But the term you need to remember is "toothless", there are some toothless laws, and some toothless enforcement agencies
When the consequences are negligible you can consider acting accordingly
Yeah, and I got a $200 ticket a few days ago for going over the speed limit while avoiding a nighttime crash recently.
Disagreeing with why you got a ticket doesn't matter once it's written.
Breaking a law doesn't matter until it does, and then it can hurt quite a bit- that ticket cut into my Christmas present money. Similarly, breaking laws with you company can impact your bottom line, and your credibility.
I'm still going to enjoy the accelerator, but I have learned not to do stupid stuff when you can't see everything that's going on.
Same with laws, and car parts- if you don't know why they're there, you oughtn't break / remove them.
> Breaking a law doesn't matter until it does, and then it can hurt quite a bit
It might or it might not matter. Many startups have proven that if you just move quickly enough, you can get away with it for long enough to become a successful company. And by the time that happens, you can just get the law changed.
The bigger problem with scooters is that they keep raising their prices. It was $.15/min a year ago and checking Lime and Uber it’s now $.32-.33/min or more than $20/hr!
I hardly see anyone using them in SF anymore. It’s cheaper to use just a regular Uber.
I’m convinced the only people using it now can’t do basic math.
I use an eskate so it does not apply 100% to scooter with wheels that are twice as large, but most of my learning curve has been around learning to deal with bad road conditions.
The roads I usually take are riddled with potholes or crossing rail tracks with huge gaps.
Cars (or rather their drivers) are also very dangerous.
I still skate to work almost every time when the weather permits but I can understand people choosing to use a car instead.
I have good hopes for the future. Once Market Street becomes more welcoming to bikes, that will open up more possibilities, adding a couple more bike oriented streets could make the whole city way more bike/skate -able.
And if you can't follow a simple set of instructions that is life or death for your startup then the management that oversaw the application (the legal team?) should be fired immediately.
San Francisco has an unusual amount of bureaucratic infighting between departments that accompanies the usual baseline apathy and hostility of a large city towards others.
What AirBnB and uber proved is that our white collar criminal laws are totally inadequate. We throw people in jail for stealing a six pack but not for blatantly conspiring to externalize billions onto the public at large in direct contraction of local laws. When the rewards of antisocial behavior are so high, only prison is adequate deterrent.
That's because the antisociality of breaking those laws is less provable than a violation of a materialized enumeration, in this sense: If you steal something from a shop, I can point a finger at the shopkeeper and say, yes that person was hurt, and by this much. Then I can point at the thief, and say that person gained, and by this much. If the identities of the victim and perpetrator are nebulous, and the externality is vague, and the laws being broken themselves are inconsistent across jurisdictions and have a history of abuse by those in power, and have in places themselves been a source of questionable action (like racist policy and blatant theft from the poor by municipalities), what you are asking for is far more challenging.
It’s not more challenging in the sense of we don’t know how to write laws that would work or that those laws would be unconstitutional.
Corporations have figured out how to use incentives, winks, and nods to avoid having anyone but the lowest level employees end up with provable beyond a reasonable doubt intent level mens rea. But we have solutions to that in our toolkit. We can define crimes as requiring only negligence or even strict liability crimes.
Those laws that you propose will still themselves be used against less powerful companies, even weaponized, by more powerful companies. Or worse, weaponized by politicians.
While the rubric grading might have seemed overly strict and bureaucratic, keep in mind that at the end of the day it's intended to stand up in court because the SFMTA could get sued given how high the stakes are and would have to demonstrate that it was a fair and transparent process.
As well, the priorities are very different now compared to 2018. The initial pilot accepted open-ended proposals and had the goal of determining whether scooters were in the public interest at all - Scoot and Skip won because their applications addressed concerns that none of the other applicants did (https://www.sfmta.com/projects/powered-scooter-share-permit-...).
This process was essentially an RFP where the SFMTA was clear on what they wanted, meaning that the firms with more operating experience, better equipment, and a stronger financial position had an advantage.
Looking at the application, Skip appears to have been screwed over on other categories too. They got a low score on "sustainability" even though they rebuild/repair broken scooters instead of throwing in the trash (like many of the other applicants). And they have actual employees instead of contractors, yet they scored low on the employment metric.
The broader issue is why even have an artificial limit for scooters? Imagine if SFMTA limited roads to just 2 car manufacturers and a set number of vehicles...
Even if Skip made 4.0 in labor, sustainability, and safety -- and the chances are they would not have done that, given that nobody else got higher than 3.5 in the first two of those categories -- they'd have come in just over 70, and still have missed the cut. So the parent poster is absolutely right.
As to the second question, despite being pretty pro-regulation myself, I don't know whether the artificial limit is really worth imposing at this point. A year and a half ago, I would have said maybe it was, based on the way scooters had become a borderline menace in San Jose -- but there don't seem to be nearly as many of them now, I suspect in part because the novelty has worn out and in part because, as someone else noted in this comment section, the prices have substantially jumped compared not just to the $2-for-30-minutes rental bikes (when they're available, granted) but to Uber/Lyft.
You need to limit scooter players because otherwise it because a game of funding and attrition, multiple companies dumping city full fo scooters in a competition for availability. All other qualities will be overlooked.
Just legalize the scrapping of scooters that have been in one place on public property for more than 24 hours. Let the general public hunt these things down tear them apart and sell them as scrap and spare parts.
The problem would sort itself out real damn quick.
Not sure why this isn't the top comment. Clearly the case. Skip is very clearly an also ran in every category, and are now trying to make it about less than it really was.
Notably, Lyfy was rejected with much higher scores and no failing categories. So Skip didnt even barely miss. It was a true whiff.
Ultimately sad, because yes, SF does have issues with companies not following the rules and profiting, but this does not appear to be such a case.
The application form requires a paragraph labeled A3, and their application had the required information but didn’t label it as A3. That’s the sort of mistake that can land you in bureaucratic purgatory anywhere in the world, which is exactly what happened, and there’s an ongoing appeal right now.
The founder’s take-away from this should have been “double-check the details, especially when dealing with a bureaucracy” instead of “optimize for the short term”. This was an unfortunate but entirely preventable outcome.
The reason "optimize for the short term" is one of the takeaways here isn't that Skip filled out their application wrong. It's that the operators who did this (such as Lime, Bird, and Spin) weren't punished by the City for it.
Classic victim blaming / blaming the user. The takeaway should be that this bureaucracy is broken, not that applicants shouldn't be able to make trivially fixable mistakes.
I'm certainly not going to defend San Francisco's behavior. I think we can all agree that Skip was wronged by the city here. If you're in a position to do something about the quality of the bureaucrats, fixing their behavior is the right choice; this article is obviously an attempt on the part of the journalist to do that.
Without meaning to imply that Skip did anything particularly wrong, I intended to dispute the lesson its CEO took away from the experience. Skip wasn't in a position to change the bureaucracy: it simply wanted to get something from it. The advice given was implicitly for other people in similar circumstances, so I modeled my take-away for the same context. Dysfunctional bureaucracies are widespread, and knowing how to successfully interact with them is a crucial survival skill in modern business. Doing everything exactly by the book is how you do that; declining to invest in the future is simply an admission of defeat.
Bureaucracy should be treated as a computer program, you have to feed it exactly what it expects. If you give to a JSON parser an object with single quoted strings it is your fault if the parser complains even though it is quite clear what you meant.
In the case of software, being clever means that you open yourself to unintended result, vulnerabilities and such, in the case of bureaucracy you open yourself to lawsuits, corruotion charges and lenghty trials
No, you expect bureaucracy to be helpful and resist when they are acting as harmful to the spirit of the law. Otherwise you get a nightmare state akin to Soviet Union.
You're right but that doesn't invidate what i said. I am not talking about how a bureaucracy should work, but how you should approach it.
Of course a helpful bureacracy will ask feedback in order not to waste your work, but unless you know how it will work expect the worst and act accordingly
This is obviously true and also irrelevant. Everyone knows that it's better to adhere to the minutiae: no one is suggesting you shouldn't put forth your best effort to do so. The complaint here is that the bureaucracy is so sensitive to those minutiae.
Perhaps one day bureaucracies will accept proposals via JSON (or other open data format... XML anyone?) rather than Word or PDF.
One could argue that these formats are more accessible than their equivalent pseudo-paper formats. It would eliminate the nitpicking over document format, as the low bar to enter would be enforced programmatically.
This would allow technologists with lesser experience in the minutia of proposal writing to compete with huge government contractors with specialists who deal in final proposal preparation. At least it would in the short term until the big contractors retooled.
I don't buy this. The government has more resources to fix UX readibility more than any other company, and I know how nitpicky a HN reader can get on UX details. So why should the government get a pass? It won't get better unless we raise our voices to the point it is heard by them.
Local governments are independent in the US and don’t operate at huge scales. Further, their independently implementing laws written by a separate group so correctness is placed well above UX.
Sadly, politics only cares for people actively involved. If you want different behavior, communicate with an elected official, try to elect different people, or run for office yourself.
Forget for a moment that a bureaucracy is involved.
If your company was bidding on a request for proposal (RFP) for a potential client, wouldn't you want to follow the customer's requirements?
Often RFP teams use failure to follow directions or specifics in a proposal submission as an informal measure of the likelihood the respondent will fail to deliver on other requirements.
I have worked for a company where I had spent 80 hours building a demo for a potential client. We did not make it to the demo phase due to a failure of our proposal writing team to address some technicality in the written proposal. I don't hold this against the client we lost; this falls on those whose jobs are solely writing and submitting technical proposals.
I do grant writing for nonprofits, public agencies, and some research-based businesses, and we endlessly tell clients to follow all RFP requirements religiously and precisely. See https://seliger.com/2008/02/25/what-does-a-grant-proposal-lo... for example:
Read the RFP carefully for formatting instructions and follow them precisely. For example, if the RFP says the proposal is to be double spaced, and does not make an exception for tables, double space all tables, no matter how silly this looks. The Department of Education, for example, will often reject proposals for non-compliance for just such nitpicking instructions.
We've seen innumerable proposals rejected for slight page limit violations, font violations, and similar minutia. Is this bullshit? Maybe. But if a funder is looking for reasons to reject you, and some are, try to give them as few reasons as possible.
The explanation for this phenomenon that I've always heard has been a matter of time.
If you're the bureaucrat reading applications, and you have a lot of applications that you need to narrow to one, you'll toss them for even the most minor rule violation.
I think this is ridiculous. Formality to the absurdist extreme. Any mildly competent human being would overlook the letters “A3” not being above a certain safety paragraph.
If a robot were processing these applications then the error might be forgivable. But if you’re a human on the job, society expects you to use the reasoning skills of a human.
I think the sort of person that would reject Skip’s application is someone that society would be better off without them in their current position. Hopefully one day they realize how their incompetence is hurting both people and progress, and either work towards using those reasoning skills or find a position better suited towards them.
>But if you’re a human on the job, society expects you to use the reasoning skills of a human.
Except it doesn't. Then society labels the process as biased, unfair, subject to the whims of the reviewer, open to corruption, and so on. One of the down voted comments jumped right to bribery for example.
Bureaucracy is this way not because it has to be but because society actually wants it to be.
I really think that no one would judge a reviewer for adding a heading where it needed to be. This is trivial, there isn’t really a political connotation here.
If a reviewer cannot do something trivial like this, then we don’t need them anyways. If the content doesn’t matter, as this bureaucracy has demonstrated, just run the application through a software that checks for word count and header presence and call it a day, and use those tax dollars towards a cause that would actually benefit society.
I would not be surprised if they had a safety specialist assigned to evaluate paragraph A3 of each proposal, in isolation from everything else. For fairness, that specialist may not have even been given access to the other parts of the applications.
In this case, the employee tasked with separating out the application pieces and sending them to the relevant specialists is likely not highly-trained, and there may be no-one in the organization competent to do this: the people that process the application as a whole aren’t qualified, and the people that are qualified can’t look at the whole application for fear of introducing bias.
> If the content doesn’t matter, as this bureaucracy has demonstrated...
I saw no indication that the contents of properly-formatted applications were being ignored. I believe it’s more likely that they set up a complicated review process that relied on applications being formatted as requested, so Skip’s application couldn’t be put through the pre-planned approval process.
I disagree with this. If they can't follow the formatting requirements of the application, then "what else are they overlooking, or likely to overlook once operating?" is a valid concern. They don't seem to indicate that it was an unknown requirement ("If the information does not have the letter A and the number 3 and then the paragraph below it, then it’s not there and you’re disqualified", [the CEO] said).
I see something of an analogy to the brown M&M's rider[1]. They don't particularly care that there are no brown M&M's, but the presence of them is a massive red flag that you have cut corners or not done your due diligence.
Wait, this doesn't sound right. The thing about brown M&Ms was that they'd had too many safety problems, and if numerous small things in the spec were violated that meant there was a safety problem. That's the core problem they were trying to solve. If numerous small things are violated in a form, like the ones mentioned elsewhere in the thread, then that's actually pretty minor.
A lesson for entrepreneurs, it really is better to go around the bureaucracy.
Uber and Lyft would not exist if they had "played nice". We can imagine a world where certain regulation would have improved their service for riders and drivers. But in the real world, if they had complied with every ask, cities would have crippled them with requirements when they first started. (Ok, you can do your Lyft thing, but let's start with 100 cars, for say, the first 3 years).
A lesson for regulators, regulation creates environments where the people who succeed are the ones who work the refs and skirt intent. These are probably less likely to be the best companies or the nicest people.
So a quick call, like "hey, put A3 in here or we can't count it" could make the world a little better. And if you would prefer to regulate people who follow the intent and not the letter of the law, you need to govern that way.
Eh. To me the whole VC e-scooter industry is a “stupid game, stupid prize” sector that won’t be around in a few years anyway.
I hardly ever see anyone riding scooters in SF. The scooter companies keep raising their prices in lock step because they have to, but it’s now gone from $.15/min to $.32-.33/min, which is more than $20/hr with tax. It’s cheaper to just use an Uber.
Have no idea who they are targeting with those prices. Kids can’t afford that. Adults would rather take an Uber at those prices.
What do you mean? I've always wanted to perch precariously on a machine that's statistically much more likely to leave me bruised and bleeding on the side of the road than the other "fresh air" alternatives, bicycling and walking, and be a hazard to others while I am at it. :)
This is a massive problem though. Businesses should be able to work with the bureaucracy. They shouldn't be incentivized to break the law. The benefits of circumventing the bureaucracy should not exceed the costs.
This article is anthropomorphising a company. The journalist has no way of knowing if everyone at Skip was a nice guy.
I had to complain to the city twice about a Skip distributor’s aggressive strategy of tying their scooters in the early morning to every available bike hoop (and even trash cans) around the Twitter building.
The city has rules about how many scooters can be tied to a public bike hoop and at least one person at Skip was not nice and was ignoring that rule.
They didn’t submit the required information in the required form.
SF wants startups to behave, that doesn’t mean that behaving startups get to ignore the standard procedures or get exceptions from requirements.
Sounds like they made a mistake in their submission, rather than they wanted to ignore something or get an exception.
For such a large city with a huge amount of tax revenue, I would expect the bureaucracy in SF to do a little better with processes like this one. It would have been trivial to review these for required sections in advance or to give companies time to submit corrections. Obviously this isn’t how it works, like you stated “standard bureaucracy”, but I’d love to see certain parts of government move further away from this mentality of being some punishing Old Testament god to serving the community.
> It would have been trivial to review these for required sections in advance
Absolutely. It is trivial! And the company making the submission is expected to do that. Which I think is very reasonable, considering that they know the requirements and make the actual submission in the first place.
It’s silly to want the reviewers to take on an additional burden in the process just because this one company made a dumb mistake which as you say would have been trivial for them to review and catch.
Reviewers are human. If they can’t use their human reasoning skills deal with something trivial like “Heading A3 should be above this paragraph” then frankly society would be much better off without them, and we should just automate them away rather than wasting our tax dollars on them.
I think the reality is much less agenda-based and much more depressing: a lot of bureaucrats couldn’t give two shits about their job and are just there to put in the minimum required effort to get their paycheck, without regard for who they might hurt along the way.
Certainly sounds like what happened here - a bored, lazy bureaucrat scanning the application for a heading and tossing it in the bin when they didn’t find it.
I’d far prefer a bureaucracy where the employees cared, even if it was caring about the “wrong” reasons.
Comments in this thread are missing the actual takeaway: when interfacing with legacy systems and bureaucracies, get help and don't DIY. Experience counts and experienced people know what to do when the form talks about "A3" which doesn't exist - or they know who to call.
In lots of arenas of life --- this one included --- if you naively follow the advice that nice and well-meaning people give you, you're going to get hosed.
As a non-driver I’ve been following the adoption of e-scooters closely and SF has been full of corruption and anti-scooter behavior since the beginning. It’s been hard to watch.
There's a story about a bowl of M&M's that made up a famous rock act's rider it was a heuristic to determine the fitness of the venue if they couldn't get a bowl of brown M&M's ready how could they be trusted with the safety of an entire soundstage?
It's surprising that e-scooters get more attention than the multi-billion dollar cannabis industry on Hacker News. State regulators are playing the same games with cannabis entrepreneurs all over the United States. They do it because they can.
Start ups and tech companies that want to innvoate definately need a new city to go to. SF is not a good place to start something new and innovative.
Why not start a new city say, in an open spot somewhere with minimal regulations and let tech companies build and innvoate as much as they want? Sure, in the beginning you need to provide incentives for some companies to go there. but once the jobs are there, people will definately follow.
SF and NYC are hotspots because that’s where the money is. That’s where the rich people are. They like to invest locally when possible. They like to see the billboards of “their” companies on the way to the airport. It’s an ego thing.
Obviously this is a generalization and not true in all cases. But it’s true enough and that’s why it’s the way that it is.
FWIW I hardly ever see people riding scooters in San Francisco anymore.
They all more than doubled their prices in the last year to $1 + .32/min + tax, which works out to more than $20/hour! At that price, it’s cheaper to just use Uber.
I use them frequently and see people on them all the time, especially during commute hours.
What Ubers have you taken in the city that work out to less than $20/hour? Even for Uber Pool that's significantly less expensive than what I've experienced.
The distance you can cover in a car is obviously much greater than that with a scooter in the same amount of time.
And it kills the use case of keeping the same scooter rented for a few hours while you hop around and do errands or go around the city since it’s too expensive now.
Seems like these scooters ended up else where to cities which were not clever enough to say no. Sweden got Bird scooters the city could have said no to buy and throw scooter companies. Scooters litter the streets which makes it hard for people with vision disabilities. Scooters tend to ride to fast for other pedestrians safety etc.
Frankly I do not like these scooters. We have bicycles made from iron and aluminium they are fully recyclable vs this electronic plastic e-waste ie scooters.
What's the end game of all of this corruption with governments picking winners and losers?
I mean there is a difference between reasonable regulations and just outright picking 1-2 cheaters who bribed you for the right to offer a service that supposedly free people are willing to pay for out of pocket.
We get stories about this in Russia and China and call it Putinism and Corruption all the time.
We've lost the ability to evaluate behavior as it is in itself. Before we judge, we have to find out whether it was a "good" or "bad" person who did it. If that doesn't help, we can perhaps find some innuendo to the effect that the actor acted as an "agent" or even "asset" of some known-"bad" "foreign" power. When we fill our brains with garbage, only garbage can come out of them.
In an extremely complex modern society it's nearly impossible to tell the effects that certain actions and policies will have. Popular discourse around politics and economics support this theory, since almost nobody can seem to agree. This leads to one of the best heuristics for evaluating the merits of an action as the intention of the actor or the ethics of the actor.
That is possibly the worst heuristic for evaluating an action. You may be right that it is somewhat natural to arrive at it, but it is by no means a good heuristic.
And why is it bad? For one, real intentions are inscrutable, so it is very easy to ascribe whatever intentions you want to an action. For another, the intentions behind an action have essentially no correlation with the effects of the action, at least insofar as the intentions are not explicitly malicious (e.g. 'hurt people').
Is there an alternative that you feel works better?
The most common alternative that I can see is "you can do whatever you want as long as it follows the letter of the law". However, that doesn't seem to work well either.
I'm not sure I understand what you mean. The question I was essentially answering was 'how can we tell whether an action was "good" or not?'. Rather than looking at the intentions of the author, I think you need to look at the effects, or some proxy thereof (are people I know poorer/richer? How many people died because of this action? Or whatever else is easily measurable and pertinent)
That strategy seems like a sure way to get taken for a ride. The only way we can infer the intentions or ethics of other people is to observe their actions and the effects of those actions. The marketing usually lies about squishy things like intentions.
Right to the point. Quite similar to the ideas of Nickolas Nassim Taleb. And part of the reason VC invest in so many "foolish" ventures, but "foolish" only retrospectively.
Yes, what a disaster having affordable car transportation that doesn't turn you away for being a minority and having cheaper alternatives to hotels available that let people make money renting out extra rooms.
> having cheaper alternatives to hotels available that let people make money renting out extra rooms.
Yeah, in that case, all the long term residents living in popular cities must be insane to hate Airbnb. Have lived in a city and a building infested with Airbnbs? If you did, you would how fucked up it is for a long term renter.
I've stayed in AirBnB's. The only way any other tenants would even know I was there was that I was taking up a parking spot. Someone would have been insane to be mad about my being there, yes.
> The other tenants are mad because landlords prefer renting apartments to tourists for 5k a month instead of renting to locals for 1k a month.
If this is happening it's because your city has a massive shortage of short-term rental properties. If you can make $5k a month then people should be building those properties left and right since it's so profitable -- but what most likely happened is that your city passed rules effectively prohibiting that construction, so now there's an arbitrage opportunity by converting long-term rentals to short-term rentals.
You should direct your anger at your local government for doing nothing to address the high short-term rental demand, because if they did then that wouldn't happen. And the same rules tend to restrict the availability of long-term rentals as well, which means that they were causing your rent to be higher than necessary even before people started converting neighboring units.
Yes, so what? Why should a tourist be forced to pay more than a "local" (who might nonetheless move out of town at a moment's notice) for what boils down to the exact same service?
Because there are massive positive externalities to people stably investing their communities (often called "social capital"). Your attitude of putting your head in the sand about things you can't measure precisely is the consistent folly of the High Modernist, "systems are simple so we can tear them down and remake them" line of thought that destroyed the American city.
I actually think cities tend to overregulate Airbnb (and housing construction), but if your model of housing policy can't tell the difference between a tourist and a resident, it's woefully incomplete.
The thing is that a NIMBY attitude does absolutely nothing to create more social capital. Places where social capital is highest are often precisely those with the strongest traditions of welcoming hospitality towards short-term-visiting ("touristy") outsiders.
I agree, and I'm probably closer to you in my opinion of nimbys than you think. But I don't think there's a problem with being aware, at a policy level, of the distinction between residents and tourists.
Some price controls and restrictions on renting out whole domiciles would be nice but the aspect of renting out a portion of an already-occupied space like I used it for is great.
Yes, airbnb used as a bed and breakfast is great. I'm not saying otherwise. But what has ended up happening is people buying multiple properties to list them only on airbnb. This has created shortage for people actually living and working in the city and driving the rent prices up in desirable neighbourhoods since tourists want to experience the city through the lens of a local person. And Airbnb actively lobbies and tries to skirt the rules where city puts a limit on how many units you can list and for how many days a year. So yeah, long story short, fuck airbnb.
Price controls are a dead political option. Laws that either mandate change or enforce original intent tend to work better. Ie forcing home buyers to sign a document stating they are not flipping the property.
> if it still comes out cheaper it’s for a reason e.g. no security, no housekeeping, no amenities, no one to help you.
Why is this a bad thing? It's just unbundling security and housekeeping and lowering the price correspondingly. If you want the full-service option hotels still exist
It’s like getting sick without health insurance. You don’t think about it until it happens. Most people underestimate the risk.
And like I said in a lot of places an Airbnb is not actually cheaper than a hotel, so in that case you’re getting ripped off because you pay the same price as a hotel without any of the benefits a hotel provides.
Airbnb has compensating benefits though. You're living "like a local", in a space that might a lot more compelling to some than your average hotel room, and often in a non-touristy area where some goods and services can be quite a bit cheaper.
I can’t be happy “living like a local” when I’m wondering in the back of my mind if the apartment I’m staying at was illegally turned into a hotel (most likely yes) and getting dirty stares from the neighbors that actually live there.
I don't think the paranoia you're describing is typical of most Airbnb users. I'm sorry, and it sounds like what you're dealing with sucks, but these details don't psychologically cancel out the advantages for most people, and as such are nowhere near a "marketing ploy"
This might shock and horrify you, but a lot of people live in _their own houses_ without 24-hour front-desk staff, room cleaning service, valet parking, or magnetic key cards.
Somehow -- honestly, I'm unclear on how -- they survive.
Simply being correct is not the only criterion for a comment being a positive contribution to the conversation. The comment also needs to relate its new information to the topic at hand.
At a guess¹, the unsupported assertion that AirBnB and Uber have been disasters is the major problem with the comment, in addition to the fact that they are not the primary subject of the conversation which makes 'randomsearch's comment feel more like a ranting non sequitur than a substantive contribution.
> the unsupported assertion that AirBnB and Uber have been disasters
...quick examples, just grabbed these articles but they're representative of the problems Airbnb has caused people and cities I have first-hand experience of:
> Uber has been stripped of its London licence after authorities found that more than 14,000 trips were taken with drivers who had faked their identity on the firm’s app.
> TfL said on Monday it had identified a “pattern of failures” by Uber, including several breaches that placed passengers and their safety at risk.
> "Short term lets are having a terrible impact. They are hollowing out communities, both in the city centre and increasingly across Edinburgh. Residents are putting up with high levels of anti-social behaviour and, very worryingly for us, we believe there is a huge impact on housing supply," said Councillor Kate Campbell (SNP), housing convenor at City of Edinburgh Council.
I didn’t mean to imply that your assertion was unsupportable, but rather to draw attention to the fact you didn’t provide any justification for it. Had you referred to one or two of these in your original comment, it would have gone a long way. Especially so if you had explicitly drawn a connection between your chosen examples and failed regulations or bureaucracy, which would have tied it into the wider conversation by an additional thread than argonaut’s name-dropping.
Deterioration of public transport is political. NIMBY's don't want public transport in their backyard, out of fear that it might bring in "undesirable" folk. Uber and Lyft have zilch to do with this.
If anything, these services make public transport more effective by solving the "last mile" problem for its users and thus obviating the need for a privately-owned car.
Airbnb is contributing to a housing crisis? You know the way out of that "crisis": Build more housing. Or more hotels, since the scarcity of hotel services is clearly what's driving Airbnb use in the first place.
If Uber/Lyft didn't exist, public transportation in US would still be horrible for a myriad of reasons. I don't know if Uber/Lyft make things worse, but they certainly aren't the root cause.
The contribution to the conversation, for those it wasn’t clear to, is that regulation exists exactly because companies are prone to behave like Uber and Airbnb, and not the other way around.
Traffic jams are bad for the environment because in general acceleration is more costly than constant speed. This is about every bodies right to clean air and a world permitting organized human life.
Right, and in order to get to this new better world with cleaner air and less stop and go traffic, who will be granted the special driving right and who will get denied? Please be as specific as possible. I want to know if I'm getting to drive on the traffic free roads or if I'll be stuck in public transportation with the peasants. This will impact my vote.
It looks like you've been using HN primarily for political battle. That's against both the rules and the spirit of this site—HN is for intellectual curiosity, which is the first casualty of political battle. Therefore we ban accounts that do this, as the site guidelines explain: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html. Would you please those and use HN in its intended spirit?
Why don't communists emigrate to North Korea? They will be able to enjoy state-provided public transportation and housing, away from those terrible profit-seeking capitalists
But the bigger point is that the SF government apparently places more weight on minor application mistakes than actual, historical "bad" behavior.
That's why this is so comical. It only feeds fuel to the truth that rules should be bent and there really is no point in "moving slow" for startups. You won't be rewarded for it. Most tech entrepreneurs already know this: Airbnb and Uber proved this point long ago.