Chris Tomlinson had a cow, even thought we asked him not to

Regarding "Uber appears to be in the subprime auto business" (Thursday Daily Digital) Chris Tomlinson sees no good coming of the ride sharing company offering car loans to future drivers.  He cites an East coast professor who declares the loans are "predatory and are very much driven toward profiting off drivers.”

Does he mean like every other car loan, ever?

At least the rhetoric has been toned down.  In the on-line version yesterday in Chron.com, Tomlinson referred to "Predatory terms", "profiting off drivers", "payday-loan racket", "exploitative lending practices", "Ayn Rand-loving sociopaths", and those are by no means all of the pejorative terms used to describe Uber in this article.

And yet despite the multitude of declarative statements, both versions of the article are amazingly fact-free: no actual rotten loan terms inflicted by Uber on the unsuspecting poor, nor a single anecdote of an abused Uber driver, just the conspiratorial musings of Chris Tomlinson enabled by yet another East Coast elitist college professor hurling accusations from his Safe Space. 

We get it. Uber, bad. But any reasonable person who read the first five sentences of the article would at least contemplate the potential good of the proposition. To do otherwise is to deny the existence of hundreds of thousands of Uber drivers oblivious of their victim-hood. 

I recommend a do-over consisting of both sides of the argument. It's the least I can expect from the Chronicle business columnist. 

Pete Smith

Cypress, TX