Ew. Not surprised you can buy the stuff that professionals shy away from for being too damned toxic, to your door, overnight delivery. Plus good reviews, hard to leave a bad review for it when you're bleeding out in the ER.
I don't use poisons for pest control. We have too many owls, hawks, and the occasional eagle overhead. I'll kill stuff mechanically (damned pocket gophers...) and toss the carcass out where something will find it and eat it, but I won't poison them. The best mouse trap is actually a slightly erratic supply of cat food.
Good reviews also barely mean anything these days. The worst item I have ever bought online, which damaged itself on opening for 100% of buyers, had ~4.1 rating. At this point, it is fair to say getting less than 4 stars means the seller was too poor/naive to hire "online promotion" services or whatever they are called, rather than anything else.
Similar to eBay seller ratings where 99.9% positive feedback means you might get your item, whereas 95% positive feedback implies the seller is stealing the goods from the factory that counterfeits them and whether you receive anything depends mainly on how the shipping carrier handles a package that catches fire in transit.
Less than 80% positive feedback has never been observed but would presumably involve the seller coming to your house to murder you and steal your identity and then using your account to leave negative feedback for themselves.
This has the same energy as that "you wouldn't steal a car" ad in IT Crowd.
But it's not far from the truth, and unless 10 news websites report on it online platforms won't even bother with an empty statement. Amazon for example lets vendors transfer good reviews to any other product by just replacing the product entry (name, description, price). Sure you then have reviews for coffee cups under some solder wire, but it fools enough users. And if the reviews are too negative you can just remove the product offer and immediately create it again.
I think it's also review shyness. My wife yelled at me once (like real, oh shit I'm in trouble, yell) for leaving a 1 star review for an Uber driver who sped the whole way and ran a red light.
That's caused by excessive metric tracking on the part of companies, and passing the blame down to individual employees. When a 5-star rating is the default and anything else is a push for the person to be fired, of course people won't leave negative reviews, that's going to prevent people from leaving accurate reviews.
If I could trust reviews to be used in good faith (e.g. by paying employees a living wage and not implicitly requiring dangerous behavior to meet quotas), then I could leave more accurate reviews.
If they were driving recklessly, then they should be fired though. Uber prices are pretty much completely dictated by supply and demand. By taking a higher volume of passengers at the cost of safety, you're increasing the supply of trips and pressuring safer drivers to match your volume. Firing the reckless drivers creates a landscape where safer drivers can fairly compete.
I’m this case a bad review could threaten someone’s livelihood and ability to feed/house themselves and their dependents. I feel a lot less bad leaving a bad review on an object on Amazon, but a bad review of a person who I know might very well lose everything because of even small changes in rating makes me nervous to rate them anything worse than a perfect score.
If you genuinely thought they were driving dangerously, then isn't it better to report it than to not? It's not really your fault that Uber's internal culture is so toxic. On the other hand, your choice to use Uber supports them. On the third hand, traditional taxi services often deliver exceptionally worse service, so what is someone to do?
Regarding the driver's livelihood, it seems to me like you should not worry so much about the choice of clicking a button in an app on your phone. For one thing, the driver probably isn't actually on the edge of ruin, and if they are it was due to a sequence of events that started long before you got into their car. If that's not the case, and Uber's in-app rating system is indeed a life destroyer, then at the very least maybe you should uninstall that app immediately, give the app itself a 1 star rating, and not associate yourself with Uber in the future, even at the cost of your own personal inconvenience? Would you ride in a taxi cab that included a loaded revolver in the back seat next to a sign that read, "satisfaction guaranteed, no questions asked"?
Their job is driving. If they do that dangerously, then yes they do deserve to lose that job. They don't get a free pass to endanger the lives of others just because they'd be financially ruined if they are fired.
I bought a small wastebasket years ago that was the perfect shape, size, material, and finish. Lots of people agreed and it had really high ratings. Recently I wanted to find the official size to buy tighter fitting bags, maybe buy another wastebasket, only to find the listing now shows a meat slicer from a different company, with all the obvious trash can reviews still in place.
I have a terrible pocket gopher problem. They absolutely have to be dealt with when they come out of hibernation this year. What's you're favorite trap for them?
I've got some long black traps with a "flag" on them that pops when triggered, and those seem to work well enough. A chunk of rebar to poke around and find the tunnel, a bit of hand digging, and I can start pulling 'em out in a hurry.
I don't use poisons for pest control. We have too many owls, hawks, and the occasional eagle overhead. I'll kill stuff mechanically (damned pocket gophers...) and toss the carcass out where something will find it and eat it, but I won't poison them. The best mouse trap is actually a slightly erratic supply of cat food.