What’s lost in this collective frenzy to demonize Uber (all while we take 2 million rides a day with the service) is that it is actually good for the world. The company’s ride-sharing service, UberPool, will almost certainly reduce greenhouse gasses, while making car ownership less attractive. Moreover, even as many Silicon Valley companies can be tsk-tsked for focusing their services on the affluent or the very lazy, Uber is the rare startup that explicitly focuses its energies on serving lower-middle class people, both by giving them work and providing transit connections to neighborhoods that are underserved. Kalanick told me that Uber was seriously considering eventually expanding to buses, which he called “the ultimate carpool machine.” Buses can hardly be conflated with elitism.