When Uber announced its plan to radically slash prices for UberX, putting massive pressure on taxis and competitors, TechCrunch said "that's just part of the story." They were right, there is another side outlined in an email Uber sent to drivers in San Francisco (full email below).

If Uber CEO Travis Kalanick is Keyser Söze, this is the moment in The Usual Suspects when he stops limping, sparks up a cigarette, and rides off in a sleek black car. Today, the e-hailing company announced "the most aggressive price cut the company has ever made," in order to handicap the competition.

We are only a day or so away from New Year's Eve, the biggest Uber car fare backlash since the last Uber car fare backlash. Rather than listening to frustrated customers and, say, capping "surge pricing" at 6x or so, Uber's anti-regulation superhero CEO Travis Kalanick has some tips on when not to use Uber.

The kumbaya sound of the "sharing economy" hums right by the fact that the irresistible middlemen who make it easy to find a place to stay or a cab at your fingertips do so for a hefty profit. And when profit and public infrastructure like housing and transportation collide, regulators are bound to follow.

There's nothing wrong with having contempt for your customers—maybe your customers really are stupid. But if you're the CEO of a prominent company in the midst of popular backlash, hoping to IPO someday, don't make your contempt obvious on Twitter.

The 2016 presidential race already has its Mama Grizzly. Meet the Ubertarian: "They support government regulation—except when it inconveniences them."

Tech corporations perks are finally growing up. AllThingsD's Jason Del Rey reports that Google has spoken with Lending Club about the possibility of using its cash holdings to offer low-interest loans to Google employees.

The more Uber's price gouging is contested, the more its defense boils down to pay up, or fuck off. Menlo Ventures investor Venky Ganesan just offered up the most tone deaf version, comparing astronomically priced Uber rides to $200,000 cancer treatments.

For Uber, this weekend's snowstorm was followed by a shitstorm, of a magnitude that would make most reviled CEOs tuck their tails for a few days. Not Travis Kalanick, the techno-libertarian mastermind at the wheel with invisible hands—he's too busy sneering at his customers.

After we wrote about Uber's weekend stupendous, wintry price-gouge-athon, a reader in otherwise lovely Los Angeles left a transit horror story of her own. Here's the brief tale of one woman's very expensive, very short trip to Hollywood.

For several hours on Saturday, Uber was maybe the most hated company in America. Some of the year's most atrocious weather dumped across the Northeast, and the transit company of the future hit customers with the worst price gouging we've ever seen—it would cost over a hundred bucks just to drive down the block. Get used to it.

When children are about old enough to stop vomiting on themselves, we teach them that instant gratification is bad—one of the simpler vices. But if Uber has its way and explodes into the big fat company of its own pipe dreams, it will make it OK for us to demand anything we want, whenever we want it.

Valleywag has obtained detailed internal financial information indicating that Uber, the e-hailing app that has spawned a hundreds of half-baked pitches, is making a lot more money than its investors had anticipated.

Uber, the rebellious car hailing smartphone app, is a big fan of bribery as a sales tactic. To break into New York City's taxi market, they offered users free rides. At South by Southwest, they rode the digerati around Austin. For a couple years now, they've doubled as an ice cream truck for a day. But now the company is offering the closest thing to being a pampered, infantilized startup employee: on-demand kitten delivery, plus cupcakes.

Late Saturday night, Bridget Todd, a writer, activist, and former lecturer at Howard University, tweeted at taxi dispatch startup Uber that she'd been choked by the driver she'd ordered on Uber's smartphone app—apparently because he was angry at her interracial relationship. Uber CEO Travis Kalanick's response, in an emailed warning to his PR team: "make sure these writers don't come away thinking we are responsible when these things do go bad…"

In the future, you'll be able to call a limousine, whenever you want one! That will be fun—but perhaps not so fun is the quiet abolition of tipping that some smartphone chauffeurs claim Lyft and Uber are pushing. Now the dispute is heading to court.

Uber is done with vociferous denials. Sort of. Raging Randian disruptor Travis Kalanick confirmed that Uber raised a $258 M. round, led by Google Ventures and TPG Capital in order to expand and "fight off protectionist, anti-competitive efforts," but the post was quickly taken down.