Last time San Francisco's BART employees went on strike, local car rental app seized the opportunity: nothing says solidarity like a private helicopter ride. Today, with more labor rumblings, Uber is offering free boat rides to avoid public transportation.

This is mostly just a shrewd publicity stunt on Uber's part, but to TechCrunch's resident bon vivant Josh Constine, it's more: "Uber wants to prove it’s about redefining transportation." This is perfect Valley hyperbole. These aren't mere boat rides, they're the future of humans in motion:

At its heart, Uber is about getting things where they need to go. Today that’s people via car. But there’s a massive opportunity in other transportation mediums for inanimate objects as well as humans.

Moving things via boat! Incredible. Just as innovative as paying someone to do your laundry. Even though the program is a one day special, Constine says "For Uber, the program demonstrates its ability to adapt to the needs of anyone or anything that needs to get from here to there." That's a truism, sure, but this is the disruptive vision: a society in which regular people can be sidestepped by innovators, in which there's no strike too burdensome that you can't just cruise around it on a boat.