Tag: Premium

Why Is Obamacare Unpopular?

ACA Knowledge

Bill Gardner reviews research on the question:

Jon Krosnick, Wendy Gross, and colleagues at Stanford and Kaiser ran large surveys to measure public understanding of the ACA and how it was associated with approval of the law. They found that accurate knowledge about what’s in the bill varied with party identification: Democrats understood the most and liked the law the most, independents less, and Republicans understood still less and liked the law the least.

However, attitudes were not just tribal. Within each party, the more accurate your knowledge of the law, the more you liked it.

Krosnick and colleagues found that most people favor most of the elements of the ACA, but not everyone recognized that these elements were all in the plan. Many people also have false beliefs about the plan. For example, only 42% of Americans correctly understood that the law does not provide free treatment for illegal aliens. Only 21% of Americans approve of this imaginary feature of the plan.

This suggests that if the public understood the ACA perfectly, support for the law would be higher. Based on their model for how knowledge about the ACA is associated with approval for the law, Krosnick and colleagues project that in the unlikely case in which the public had perfect understanding of the law,

the proportion of Americans who favor the bill might increase from the current level of 32% to 70%.

Keep in mind, however, that Krosnick’s survey can’t show us that change in knowledge would cause change in approval. Perhaps causality runs the other way and it is approval of the law that drives people to seek information about what is in it.

But all of this is a huge indictment of the president’s and the Democrats’ approach to talking about the law. In my view, they should have been using every single opportunity to explain what the law actually does, compared with the system it replaced. Yes, there has been a mountain of propaganda against it. But that doesn’t excuse political malpractice in defending it. This is the Democrats’ most significant piece of domestic legislation in decades. And yet they cannot manage to make the case for it. That tells you so much about why that party remains such a shit-show, rescued temporarily by this president, but still wallowing in its own dysfunction, inability to communicate and pusillanimity.

How Seriously Should We Take Christie?

Compared to most other GOP presidential contenders, Christie isn’t well liked by Republicans:

Favorables

Despite such numbers, Mark Leibovich sees the logic of a Christie run:

There is a theory in presidential politics that electorates will gravitate to the candidate who represents the biggest departure from the incumbent, especially if they have grown weary of that incumbent. “That’s the argument people make to me about why I should run,” Christie told me during one of our conversations. “They’re like: ‘No one could be more the opposite of Barack Obama from a personality standpoint than you. Therefore, you’re perfect.’ ” Yet one of the more compelling aspects of a Christie candidacy would be his ability to start an overdue fight within his own party.

In 2012, Mitt Romney never took on the G.O.P.’s far right, which has more than its own fair share of bullies. He was content to run right in the primaries, tout his “severe conservative” stripes and hope it would not end up costing him with swing voters in the general election. (It did.) In a brief period of reckoning after the 2012 election, Republican leaders spoke of their need to expand their shrinking base and appeal to Hispanics, African-Americans, women and younger voters rather than bow to unrelenting hard-liners. Christie could be the candidate with the best shot of pulling this off. “Christie’s strength is that people think he is being straight with them,” said Tom Kean, a former New Jersey governor and one of Christie’s political mentors. “If he kowtows to anyone, and people stop believing that he’s saying what he means, he’s going to kill the brand.”

Kean told me that Christie “is the best politician I’ve seen since Bill Clinton.” [Haley] Barbour said he “has a strong starting place in 2016.” But for all of the noise he has made, there is a difference between being an operative and being a national politician. Christie’s positions on immigration reform, foreign policy and certain social issues remain very much a black hole, not to mention an object of great suspicion, on the right. Running in a Republican presidential-primary campaign would be considerably harder than showering cash on his fellow governors and being dubbed by the media as a “winner” of this cycle. On some level, Christie might be just the latest intriguing moderate for the small media-obsessed wing of the Republican Party that gave us Presidents Giuliani and Huntsman.

We Might Be Over Ebola, But Ebola Isn’t Over, Ctd

kathy1

The latest YouGov poll illustrates how quickly Americans have moved on from freaking out about the disease and the government’s response to it, indicating that media sensationalism and partisan politics infected far more Americans than Ebola ever will:

Republicans have exhibited the greatest change.  At the end of October, 67% of Republicans said the government wasn’t doing enough to contain the Ebola outbreak.  That percentage has dropped 28 points.  Just 39% of Republicans now say the government isn’t doing enough. There is also less interest in increasing government spending to deal with the outbreak.  Just one in four today would increase government spending on Ebola research, down from 36% at the end of October.

But perhaps the most striking example of public satisfaction with the government’s performance is the change in the way Americans evaluate the President’s performance.  For the first time in two months, more Americans approve of the way Barack Obama is handling this situation than disapprove.

Josh Marshall even suspects that Christie has quietly retired his draconian quarantine policy for health workers returning from West Africa, though he can’t seem to get a straight answer out of the state of New Jersey. There’s also some good news on the international front:

the World Health Organization reports that the number of Ebola cases has stopped increasing in Guinea and Liberia, though they are still on the rise in Sierra Leone, while Mali seems to be keeping its second minor outbreak under control.

But even if outbreaks have peaked, that doesn’t mean these countries’ troubles are over. Last week, Abby Haglage called attention to warning signs of an “Ebola famine” in Liberia:

[Last] Tuesday, Mercy Corps published (PDF) a shocking finding: 90 percent of Liberian households are reducing the amount of food they eat at each meal, and 85 percent are actually eating fewer meals than they were before the health crisis. In a country where food was already scarce, slimmed-down portions could be the difference between life and death. A vendor in Monrovia told Mercy Corps investigators that she and her eight children can no longer afford to eat 10 cups of rice a day. They’ve cut rations down to eight. Simultaneously on Tuesday, the UN Human Rights campaign released a statement warning that West Africa may be “on the brink of a major food crisis” due to Ebola.

A new World Bank report confirms just how much damage the epidemic has done to Liberians’ livelihoods:

To measure the economic impact of that devastation, the World Bank, Liberian Institute of Statistics and Geo-Information Services and the Gallup Organization conducted phone surveys and found that not only is a massive part of the country’s work force out of job, but food insecurity is worsening. Wage workers and the self-employed have taken the biggest hit, the report finds. Prior to the epidemic, more than 30% of working household breadwinners were self-employed, but now that rate is just above 10%. Many people lost jobs because their business or government offices closed.

Yglesias Award Nominee

“The reasons for rethinking the intervention go beyond Libya itself. I had placed a great deal of emphasis on the demonstration effects of an intervention. My hope had been that the intervention would act to restrain other autocrats from unleashing deadly force against protesters and encourage wavering activists to push forward in their demands for change. Unfortunately, this only partially panned out and had unintended negative effects. U.S. cooperation with the Gulf Cooperation Council states in Libya compelled it to turn a blind eye to the simultaneous crushing of Bahrain’s uprising.

The worst effects were on Syria. The Libya intervention may have imposed a certain level of caution on Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, leading him to search for just the right level of repression to stay beneath the threshold for international action. But that didn’t last for long and his violence quickly escalated,” – Marc Lynch, in a bracing reflection on his misjudgments in the fast-moving era of the Arab Spring.

I await the other advocates of the Libya debacle to approach this kind of intellectual honesty. Larison, meanwhile, notes that

the demonstration effect and deterring-dictators arguments never made much sense, as I said many times back in 2011.

What I found the most troubling was the argument that such a major move, with unforeseeable consequences, was justified urgently to avoid a potential massacre. In other words, a humanitarian emergency was used to brush away all the usual weighing of the pros and cons of such a grave decision as to go to war. Which, to my mind, only underlines the necessity of restoring the Congress’s full control of war powers.

The Tweet That Backfired

It’s a very big day in British politics, as the polls close in the Rochester by-election, where the anti-immigrant and anti-EU party, UKIP, is poised to score another huge victory over the Tories in what should be a supremely safe Conservative seat. But the news today is about the Labour Party MP’s tweet seen above. It feeds into a popular shorthand for working/middle class white voters who are turned off by the metropolitan elites. They’re known as “white van” men, for their unprepossessing vehicular choices. And, in this case, as you can see, they’re also patriotic. Hence the massive gaffe from Labour today – which will also intensify the doubts about party leader Ed Miliband’s leadership as the next election approaches.

Think of the flap as similar to the “cling to their guns and religion” kerfuffle, a sign for some that the British left has long since lost an appeal to white non-college-educated men, and now reflexively mocks them and their view of the world. Hence this tweet:

These are combustible, populist times in which political elites are under immense pressure. If UKIP win this one tonight, the divide between Westminster and much of England outside London will only grow; and the chances of a sharp turn to the anti-immigrant, anti-European right more likely.

Ferguson On Edge

Protest Outside Ferguson Police Department

Protesters were arrested last night. And a court decision could drop tomorrow:

The grand jury hearing evidence on the Michael Brown shooting is preparing to meet Friday for what might be its final session, and a decision on whether to charge Officer Darren Wilson could come the same day, law enforcement officials briefed on the plans said.

On Monday, Governor Jay Nixon declared a state of emergency and activated the National Guard. Jamelle Bouie disapproves of such actions:

[W]hile many Ferguson residents were disturbed by the damage done during the earliest protests, there’s anger over the choice to declare a state of emergency, and rightfully so.

Remember, the initial Ferguson protests—which began the afternoon Brown was killed—weren’t violent. Instead, at first dozens, then hundreds of people gathered to peacefully protest the shooting and demand answers for why Brown’s body was allowed to lie in the sun for four hours before police took action. If there was unrest that day, it was less because of the protesters and more because of police.

As soon as residents met to protest Brown’s death that day, police brought scores of reinforcements. The Ferguson Police Department called in more than 100 officers from other jurisdictions, with some officers wielding dogs and shotguns. Given the circumstances—an angry community that wanted answers over the death of a teenager—it was an overreaction that engendered mistrust and worsened the situation.

Amy Davidson argues along the same lines:

The grand jury may surprise those who expect it to let Officer Wilson walk away. Those who are watching the people of Ferguson with such worry now may be asked to comprehend them in ways they haven’t before. It is treated as somehow exceptional that there were no riots after the acquittal of George Zimmerman in the shooting death of Trayvon Martin, in Florida. But what is often forgotten there is that what Martin’s parents asked for, first and foremost, was simply a trial of some kind, a chance for their son’s story to be heard in open court—at first, it looked as if it never would be. They got that, if not the full measure of accountability they hoped for. The fearfulness of the authorities in Missouri has been seen as an insult to the black community and a preëmptive strike against perfectly legal peaceful protests. Both of those elements are there, and both, counterproductively, increase tensions and reduce trust.

Paul Cassell hopes for transparency from the grand jury:

Several weeks ago, Bob McCulloch (the St. Louis County prosecuting attorney supervising the grand jury) issued a little-discussed news release, promising that if the grand jury decides not to charge, he will then seek to have the grand jury’s information made publicly available: “If the grand jury does not return an indictment, then I will ask the court to order that the evidence be released to the public as soon as possible if not immediately.”  (McCulloch has also pointed out that if the grand jury makes a decision to return charges, no such motion will be required because the facts will naturally emerge during the criminal trial.)

… It is hard to imagine a court turning down McCulloch’s request to release the grand jury information.  This will make the Michael Brown shooting investigation far more “transparent” than just about any other high-profile criminal investigation.

(Photo: A protestor in a Guy Fawkes mask, raises his hands in front of a line of police outside the Ferguson Police Department as part of continued demonstrations in regards to the shooting death of Michael Brown by police officer Darren Wilson in Ferguson, Missouri on November 19, 2014. By Samuel Corum/Anadolu Agency/Getty Images)

The Payoff Of Amnesty

Alex Nowrasteh claims that the “economic impact of this legalization will be positive”:

In the wake of the 1986 Reagan amnesty, wages for legalized immigrants increased – sometimes by as much as 15 percent – because legal workers are more productive and can command higher wages than illegal workers.[i]  Being legal also allows these immigrants to invest in U.S.-specific human capital, like learning English, which will increase their productivity and wages.  Unlawful immigrants are less likely to make these investments in human capital because they could be deported, thus wiping out such investment.  We will likely see a similar increase in the wages of many of the unlawful immigrants legalized today.  This benefit would likely accrue to all of the working unlawful immigrants who would be legalized under this executive order.

Professor Raul Hinojosa-Ojeda of UCLA wrote a paper for Cato in 2012 in which he employed a dynamic model called the GMig2 to study comprehensive immigration reform’s impact on the U.S. economy.  He found that a full legalization of unlawful immigrants will increase U.S. GDP by about $700 billion dollars over the next ten years, primarily by allowing the legalized workers to be more productive.  Any impact of legalizations on GDP would be smaller under an executive order because many of them would be temporary and it would not cover the entire unlawful immigrant population, but it would still produce hundreds of billions of dollars of more GDP within ten years.

In a piece we cited earlier today, Carl Hampe outlined other potential economic benefits:

Many U.S. companies provide goods and services that are purchased by the estimated 11 million undocumented. If half of them obtain work authorization, their purchasing power should increase, and this would benefit the U.S. economy generally. Many U.S. companies hire unskilled workers, and some of these companies expend significant resources ensuring that they do not knowingly hire undocumented immigrants when doing so. If the pool of authorized workers were expanded by 5 million people, some U.S. companies would have a larger pool of authorized labor from which to recruit, and their liability concerns would be diminished. Indeed, the president’s proposal would benefit compliance-minded U.S. companies that would now be able to attract newly work-authorized individuals away from companies that paid less competitive wages and were not as mindful of the hiring rules. This should benefit all unskilled U.S. workers, not merely those who are undocumented.

A Democrat Finally Steps Up

Senate Holds Cloture Vote On Immigration Bill

Jim Webb just launched a presidential exploratory committee, the first Dem to do so. Tim Murphy quips that Webb’s announcement video “looks like it was filmed by the people who make commercials for personal-injury attorneys.” Regardless, Larison is pleased by the news:

Assuming that Webb is able to drum up some substantial support in the coming months, his entry into the race should be very good and healthy for the Democratic Party and the country. There had to be someone in the primaries ready and able to hold Clinton accountable for her poor judgments on policy, and there needed to be someone qualified to make her earn a nomination that has so far been treated as her dynastic inheritance. Even an unsuccessful challenge will force Clinton to face up to the mistakes on her record, and it will offer Democratic voters a serious alternative to the establishment favorite.

Kos dismisses Webb’s talk of bipartisanship:

He was a great candidate for us in Virginia in a different time. Talk of “bringing America together” rings hollow given the realities of the modern GOP. And it’s unnecessary given the realities of America’s modern demographics.

Kilgore also isn’t taking Webb seriously:

I really, really don’t think the average potential primary supporter of Webb against Clinton is going to kick out the jams for a candidate who thinks the real problem in Washington is insufficient bipartisanship. Been there, done that, with Obama, and even Obama struggles to pay lip service to the idea, particularly now on the eve of an intensely partisan fight over immigration policy.

But Enten argues that running to center is a smart play:

Clinton has less support among moderate and conservative Democrats than she does among liberal Democrats. Additionally, three CNN surveys have asked Democratic primary voters whether they prefer Clinton, a “more conservative Democrat” or a “more liberal Democrat.” Clinton has averaged 67 percent in these surveys. The more liberal Democrat has averaged just 11 percent. The more conservative Democrat, on the other hand, has averaged 18 percent. Again, Clinton is the heavy favorite, but anti-Clinton voters prefer a more conservative option.

Morrissey finds it “difficult to figure how seriously to take this bid”:

He doesn’t have much of a following any longer, having been all but absent for the last two years. He didn’t campaign significantly for Barack Obama in 2012, if at all, nor did he do anything for Democrats in this cycle — even though Webb tried grabbing attentiona couple of times this year about his 2016 aspirations. Webb seems to think that it’s still 2006 and the Left will draft him again without having to do any of the party-building work necessary for most serious contenders, such as Hillary Clinton. She may not have been effective in this cycle, but she and Bill hit the campaign trail and tried to get Democrats elected, as did Warren, Joe Biden, Martin O’Malley, and other Democrats who might be looking at a bid. Webb’s sat out campaigning since the 2008 election for Obama.

Philip Klein expects Webb’s opposition to women in combat to doom him:

In the 2016 context, given the Democratic Party’s recent emphasis on pushing the “war on women” narrative and the fact that Clinton has a good chance to become the first female president, Webb will be skewered as a fossil for having held these sorts of views.

But Michael Tracey insisted last week that Webb is Hillary’s most formidable challenger:

During his 2006 Virginia Senate run — back when Clinton and Obama still fervently insisted that marriage was “between one man and one woman” — Webb opposed a state constitutional amendment on the ballot that banned all same-sex unions. The measure still passed by 14 percentage points, which means that many social conservatives voted for both the victorious Webband the ban, indicating his unique ability to garner support from non-conventional Democratic constituencies.

Democrats who are seeking a better way forward — and who want to avoid the dangerous “Clinton inevitability trap” — should turn their gazes to Webb.

(Photo by Jamie Rose/Getty Images)

Is Another Shutdown Brewing? Ctd

Lauren Fox reports on the thinking of Republicans:

Many rank-and-file Republicans see an upcoming funding bill that must pass by Dec.11 as the party’s best shot to stop Obama from implementing his immigration plan. Boehner has signaled that “no option” is off the table, and more than 60 House Republicans have already sent a letter advocating the approach. In the Senate, top Republican Mitch McConnell has attempted to squash any shutdown banter, but some in his right flank still might push for a funding showdown.

Members of the Republican Conference say they don’t want the confrontation over government funding to come down to a government shutdown, but many don’t see how, even if that does happen, they could lose politically.

Erick Erickson is itching for a shutdown:

Sure, the GOP may get blamed. But so what? And that is key here — so what. They got blamed last time and the public rewarded them with the biggest election wave in modern American political history from the local level to the federal level.

Bill Scher suspects Obama is trolling the GOP:

Despite the strong sense coming from the House Republican leadership that it has far more control over its caucus now than it did during the Tea-Party-fueled insurgency of 2010, no issue has more potential than immigration to ignite the hard-right base and embarrass Speaker John Boehner—especially after the speaker’s post-election warning to Obama not to “play with matches”—or to cause headaches for the GOP heading into the 2016 elections.

The White House knows this. Thus, we could be witnessing the deployment of a strategy in which the president does indeed play with matches, quite deliberately, and he’s about to throw one right into the tinderbox of the House GOP caucus.

Chait believes a shutdown would be a disaster for the GOP:

The prospective shutdown is such an insanely bad idea that it is worth diagnosing what mental breakdown led the party to a place where this course of action has received serious consideration. One possible answer is that it stems from a congenital aggressiveness. Tom Edsall, a Washington reporter and longtime denizen of bipartisan poker games, once observed that the two parties display notably different approaches toward risk. “Conservative poker players are more willing to go for the kill,” while liberals “will simply check and turn over their cards to collect a more modest amount.”

There are times when the all-or-nothing play makes perfect sense. This is not one of them. A government shutdown does not give Republicans leverage — it gives Obama leverage. They have no winning move here. The only play is to cut their losses and muddle through while sustaining as little damage as possible.

Previous coverage of the possible shutdown here.

Uber Creepy

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I’ve long been a fan of Uber. For someone who doesn’t know how to drive, it’s been a godsend. The cab industry deserves all the competition it can get. It empowers individual entrepreneurs and uses technology in ways that improve everyone’s lives. But it sure does appear that the company’s management is more than a little douchey. My suspicions began when, after I first approved a surge-pricing fare increase, suddenly every subsequent car request came with such a surcharge – even on a quiet Sunday morning. Last night, a driver canceled a trip two minutes after informing us that he was “arriving now”. I’ve had to get out of two Ubers in the past year because the driver was an asshole. And, of course, the rumors and stories of its unethical and puerile hounding of its competitors are legion.

And now its senior vice president, Emil Michael, was dumb enough to get all frank and intimate with Ben Smith at the Waverly Inn last Friday suggesting that the company hire opposition researchers to dig up dirt on journalists who criticize its business practices, specifically citing legendary PandoDaily journalist, Sarah Lacy, who had accused the company of “sexism and misogyny”:

At the dinner, Michael expressed outrage at Lacy’s column and said that women are far more likely to get assaulted by taxi drivers than Uber drivers. He said that he thought Lacy should be held “personally responsible” for any woman who followed her lead in deleting Uber and was then sexually assaulted. Then he returned to the opposition research plan. Uber’s dirt-diggers, Michael said, could expose Lacy. They could, in particular, prove a particular and very specific claim about her personal life.

Uber wouldn’t be the first tech company to investigate journalists who report on it, but the incident didn’t do much for Uber’s public image as a hyper-aggressive firm with loose ethics. Uber CEO Travis Kalanick took to Twitter soon after the story broke to apologize to Lacy, denounce Michael’s “lack of humanity”, and stress that the company has no plans to doxx journos it doesn’t like. Michael himself also apologized. These mea culpas – in fourteen separate tweets – don’t quite cut it for Alison Griswold, though:

Kalanick thinks Michael’s comments were “terrible.” He says those comments display a “lack of leadership, a lack of humanity, and a departure from our values and ideals.” He says Uber should be focused on building a positive narrative to “inspire” riders and drivers, to show the “positive principles that are the core of Uber’s culture.” He promises to do “everything in my power” to earn trust from Uber’s community. So as many Twitter users have already pointed out: Doesn’t that start with firing Michael?

Lacy herself is furious:

Uber’s dangerous escalation of behavior has just had its whistleblower moment, and tellingly, the whistleblower wasn’t a staffer with a conscience, it was an executive boasting about the proposed plan. It’s gone so far, that there are those in the company who don’t even realize this is something you try to cover up. It’s like a five-year-old pretending to be Frank Underwood. Only one with billions of dollars of assets at his disposal.

And lest you think this was just a rogue actor and not part of the company’s game plan, let me remind you Kalanick telegraphed exactly this sort of thing when he sat on stage at the Code Conference last spring and said he was hiring political operatives whose job would be to “throw mud.” I naively thought he just meant Taxi companies. Let me also remind you: This is a company you trust with your personal safety every single time you use it. Let me also remind you: The executive in question has not been fired.

Josh Marshall is mystified at how Uber’s executives can be so tone-deaf:

Separate from the details of this incident, it’s been quite a while since I’ve seen what is by any measure an amazingly successful startup manage to generate this much negative publicity based fairly narrowly on the behavior of its top executives. … But what is so odd is that Uber, at the end of the day, is in a business where the basic project is about reliability and safety. And yet the guys running the company seem kind of reckless and even a bit nuts. Unlike the men and women you’d hope would be driving your Uber ride (and, in my experience, they often are those people), the guys running Uber seem like the result of some genetic experiment marrying up the 17th century Caribbean pirate with the 21st century North American Bro.

To Alexander Howard, the incident raises serious privacy concerns, given that Uber collects enough data about users to infer, say, where they slept last night, or with whom:

With great data comes great power, and therefore responsibility. That means culture and ethics matter. The reason Michael was angry at Sarah Lacy appears to be because of her excoriating post about Uber’s culture.

Now, imagine if powerful members of Congress decide that they don’t like Uber’s labor practices, or surge pricing, or its approach to flaunting regulatory strictures, or the way it lobbies city governments not to be subject to reporting on compliance with accessibility laws. What then? Will the same executives who have shown a limited “God View” at launch parties choose not to use more powerful internal analytics to track who is going where and when? What policies and code would stop them from looking at the profiles of Senators and Representatives and drawing conclusions about where and when they go? Or for that matter, my profile, or yours?

I can’t imagine Uber regaining minimal trust without firing Michael. Tim Lee is not far off the same page:

There’s no evidence that Uber has ever misused its data in this way, and Uber says it has strict policies designed to safeguard customer privacy. But policies are only as trustworthy as the people enforcing them. When an Uber executive openly muses about intimidating reporters with sensitive personal information, that’s a sign that he might not be sufficiently committed to ethical behavior to be a senior executive at a powerful company like Uber. And the fact that Kalanick sat silently through Michael’s comments, and then chose not to fire him when the comments became public, suggests he might not take ethical considerations seriously enough, either.

It’s also worth talking about whether Uber’s customers should have legally enforceable rights protecting the privacy of their travel data.

In response to these concerns, Uber published a post on its company blog Tuesday night clarifying that it has “a strict policy prohibiting all employees at every level from accessing a rider or driver’s data”, with exceptions for “a limited set of legitimate business purposes” such as facilitating payments or detecting fraud. Meanwhile, Katie Benner reminds the Uberites that they won’t be the only game in town forever:

Remember, Uber is special because it was the right company at the right time. It’s the most elegant expression of how real life, mobile devices and payments are coming together to make our phones a remote control for the way we live.

Yet Uber’s underlying software is replicable. Uber refuses to make its drivers actual employees, and those drivers can always go to a competitor that offers a better deal. Consumers aren’t locked in either. So if a mass group of consumers (not just those that obsess over industry blogs like TechCrunch and Valleywag) now see Uber as a company that doesn’t respect their safety, their data or their drivers, they can drop Uber from their trusted group of apps. Other options are available.

And Neil Irwin declares that it’s time for the company to grow up:

The idea of a showing up to a meeting with a JPMorgan executive and hearing, “I notice you were late on your mortgage payment last month,” is just unfathomable, so great are the protections in the financial industry between access to consumer data and the executives and public relations people who tend to deal with reporters. The same could be said for any number of other industries where big companies have access to private data. Hotel chains? Retailers? This is just not the way things work.

And the reality for Uber is that, much as it may still see itself as a start-up, its scale and ambitions mean that it is rapidly becoming an important company, operating in 48 countries with thousands of drivers. … It’s great to have employees exhibit “fierceness” and “super-pumpedness,” two qualities on which Uber reportedly evaluates its workers. But the bigger you get, the more you also need qualities like discipline and wisdom.