At least over the last 2 yrs I was saying that Uber and Lyft should get out of the self driving tech business. Its not who they are, and there is no reason to invest in it when they could easily consume the best tech out there when it becomes available. I now feel even more strongly so. In fact it feels like these companies might themselves be re-evaluating their priorities at this point. I see absolutely no reason to invest in FSD themselves other than to attract talent.
They should instead accept that their value to the world is they unified the taxi system and turned it into a global service that drivers can use. They should focus on their core business and figure out their issues with drivers and employees. They could cut the FSD costs and instead partner with Google or some other company. Or they could wait and also partner with any other car manufacturer out there that gets to FSD market. These companies could be huge buyers of the tech when available and so auto manufacturers will fall over themselves to get their business.
If FSD had actually turned out to be as easy as some people were suggesting 5+ years ago then there is no way Uber or Lyft could avoid playing in that game; the first company who could mass-produce FSD vehicles would be able to replace Uber/Lyft with no difficulty at all. Once it became apparent that the 'any day now' BS from Musk et al was a lie then both companies should have dropped any efforts in this direction immediately.
An MIT study indicated developing their own FSD technology would yield at most a small margin improvement because the technology wouldn't be exclusive for long, and shortly after it would be utterly commodity. [1]
I agree. FSD is far more complex than even Musk imagined (or at least has portrayed) and while I'm very impressed with what's been done in that field I'd never use it in the real world.
About a year ago I penned a short essay about this exact subject. Central argument is that Uber is the type of organization that should be open to public ownership given that there is no road to profitability for them. Since writing, states like CA have taken firmer stances on gig economy workers and employment status. The alternative is that Uber continues to try and find avenues of financialization instead of continuing to experiment and innovate with their core service model.
It's too bad that this whole article never touches on the basics of Uber's business model, like how much money they lose on each ride, how much funding they have to ride out the current economic climate, the crazy fact that Uber Eats is now a larger part of Uber's American business than the drive-me-somewhere Uber business, and so on.
I don't see how Uber's business model is doomed. If Uber and Lyft are forced to be less efficient, they will raise prices. Yes, their business would shrink. But how could they be forced out of business entirely - would people go back to using taxis?? At the very least, Uber could charge the same price as taxis and be superior to taxis because an Uber actually shows up when you want one.
I recommend the Naked Capitalism series on Uber's economics. [1] It's a 23-part series that goes back years, but the most recent one I linked you from a few months ago should be a good starting point.
"Uber announced a first half 2020 GAAP loss of $4.7 billion with a GAAP net margin of (-81%). Uber’s “official” full year 2019 result was a GAAP loss of $8.5 billion with a (-60%) margin, but these were based on problematic accounting that makes it impossible to evaluate Uber’s financial performance properly over time."
"Uber has now lost $23.2 billion in the past four and a half years."
"Nothing has happened to change the fact that after ten years, riders have always been fundamentally unwilling to pay prices that would cover Uber’s actual costs, that Uber was always less efficient than the traditional taxis it drove out of business, that its only “efficiency improvement” was to push driver compensation to minimum wage levels, and that its growth depended entirely on unsustainable predatory subsidies."
There is nothing Uber/Lyft do that any urban taxi company cannot do just as good if not better. The taxi companies also have better economics when it comes to their fleet (you can expect states to start mandating that gig drivers be paid some additional amount for vehicle depreciation any day now...) At the end of the day Uber/Lyft will be just another taxi company, albeit with a less professional set of drivers.
Uber and Lyft have strictly worse unit economics than taxi companies because taxi companies pool their fleet rentals and insurance -- something Uber in the existing model simply could not do. To obtain the same net revenue, Uber would have to charge more per ride than a taxi company.
> There is nothing Uber/Lyft do that any urban taxi company cannot do just as good if not better.
Well they can't seem to manage to be come when you ask them to, to be clean, or to have a basic standard of politeness. Until recently they didn't manage to accept cards, and many seem to still greatly resent it, and they still can't manage to provide nice apps.
So I'm super skeptical that they can do it as good as Uber, let alone better.
It's like Uber's been so good for so long now that people have forgotten how offensively bad normal taxis are.
Taxis in every European city I've ever been to have been fundamentally consumer-hostile. They refuse to accept your card (illegally in some cases), their vehicles are filthy, and their customer service skills are offensive. It's like every ride I take with them is some kind of personal inconvenience for them.
I got in a taxi at Brussels airport once. Fortunately the previous week I'd had issues with a Washington DC cab driver refusing a credit card, and had the wherewithal to check he took them before we left. He didn't.
The less said about the awful black cabs in London the better. Rarely take a taxi in London, but if I have a lot of bags I will, and it's not going to be a black cab.
Don't have this issue with Uber, it gives me a rough price (which is pretty accurate IME). I can count on one finger the issues I've had (driver didn't turn up at Nairobi airport, claimed he'd been arrested, had to book another one)
I've had issues in Beijing with taxis - thinking back I suspect the main issue is that Uber just didn't exist in Beijing.
> There is nothing Uber/Lyft do that any urban taxi company cannot do just as good if not better.
This has been true for the decade that Uber has been in operation yet no urban taxi company has built anything even close to a comparable app or experience.
There were a few, like Flywheel, but the whole Uber business model is propped up on big money providing utterly unsustainable subsidies to riders. Nobody wants to pay what it actually costs to provide the service as evidenced by the fact they've been unable to raise prices. Once they run out of money to set fire to, there won't be an Uber.
Butts in seats is a strictly commodity business, whoever charges the least gets the ride. Just like airlines. The difference is airlines are roughly equivalently efficient, but Uber and Lyft are strictly less efficient than taxis.
I'm not convinced that ride shares are unsustainable. The average fare I've paid is certainly greater than the cost of paying the driver's wages and gas for the vehicle.
The difference should more than make up for the cost of maintaining an app in the long term so I don't see any reason that some company can't eventually be profitable in this space.
Flywheel was (still is?) a too little too late attempt by taxi companies to stay relevant and as far as I remember, it didn't even work very well.
> At the end of the day Uber/Lyft will be just another taxi company, albeit with a less professional set of drivers.
What city do you ride taxis in? Because the taxis I've ridden have spanned a range of tolerably annoying to downright abysmal experiences. Uber/Lyft drivers have unequivocally been more friendly, punctual, and professional. No taxi company I've seen can manage to make a halfway decent app or even guarantee that a driver will show up within an hour of me needing one.
Even if Uber/Lyft become the same price as taxis, I'll take Uber/Lyft any day over a traditional cab company.
I've taken taxis in many European cities. It's universally a miserable, sketchy experience.
European taxis are the absolute worst for trying to wiggle out of accepting your credit card. Ever time I get in a European taxi I know I have a fight on my hands.
It depends on the country and city - here in Ireland the taxis are almost always a class act. My local taxi company allows payment via smartphone and even sends you the invoice via SMS or email if you need it as a business expense. I've even had a driver turn off the metre and show me around once he realised I was new to the city.
And tipping, although appreciated, is not at all mandatory like in the states.
The most universal issue with taxis around the world is safety. How do I know whether a taxi driver is going to take me to my destination, or drive me to an alley and mug me?
Apps like Uber are a major safety improvement over taxis. If I get out of an airport and need a ride, I can either hop in a taxi and pray I get to my destination safely, or I can take an Uber and have a paper trail of who picked me up and where I went.
> At the end of the day Uber/Lyft will be just another taxi company, albeit with a less professional set of drivers.
I haven't been to a country yet where "professional taxi driver" was a benefit. What made Uber great was that the drivers were nice people, doing it as a temporary / side job in a car that they were taking care of personally, and not a professional cheater in a smelly 20 old, rarely washed car.
Again, I always have to mention this. Go to any country where you don't speak the native language and uber/lyft/grab(SEA) are 10x better than taxis. No haggling. No getting in the taxi for an agreed price and then the driver deciding it should be more. No attempts to sell you their "tour".
Uber/Lyft offer a better service. Most importantly is reviews/ratings of drivers and riders. But also things like real time tracking of incoming ride, frictionless payments, even just inputting you destination in a map instead of explaining to someone (which is a huge plus when traveling to foreign countries.)
Sure taxi companies _could_ implement these features but so far they have not. Probably because the type people who are attracted to running taxi companies are not the same kind of people attracted to disruptors like Uber/Lyft.
From my personal experience I have a pleasant taxi ride 5-6 times out of 10 and a pleasant Uber ride closer to 9 out or 10. Even if the prices were the same I'd likely still choose Uber/Lyft.
But Uber is "everywhere" so when travelling you don't have to download additional apps, ask someone to call a taxi for you or hail one in the streets. You also don't have to deal with payments or risk being ripped off.
The tech or overhead on Uber can't be that expensive so I really don't see why they shouldn't be able to pay decent wages and make profit.
I have traveled a lot. In all of my travels, I use Uber unless I'm forced to use a local option. Here's why:
1. Integration with mapping allows me to ensure I'm actually be taken to the place I want to go and not "taken for a ride". This is especially important when I don't speak the local language well or at all.
2. I can pay in a way which does not expose my payment method to the driver (credit card skimmers, muggings). I also can always pay with a card via the app, rather than having to struggle to find a driver who will accept a card payment or who won't extort me after the fact with "the machine is broken".
3. I can track my trips in a way which makes it easy to expense them, something that is a pain to do with taxi receipts (if you can even get them to give you one).
4. I have some idea of what I'll be paying in advance and am more resistant to being overcharged.
5. When I request a ride, someone actually shows up and I have a meaningful ETA for their arrival.
If you've never left your part of the world to travel elsewhere it may be difficult to understand just how frustrating, unsafe, and unfair the experience of using a taxi in most of the world is, but Uber even at the same price is a many many many times better experience. I hate taxis and avoid them at all costs. In places without Uber, I strongly preference public transport even for very long rides, because taxis are usually worse. I preference public transport everywhere when it's good, but there are many parts of the world with bad public transport and even worse taxi services.
> because an Uber actually shows up when you want one.
When Uber starts to face its economic reality, I predict the first thing to go will be service in my neighborhood.
Uber has been subsidizing rides everywhere in the city. Which means that my neighborhood is excessively cheap given the low demand. I've paid $14 for what would cost $35 in a taxi.
When Uber stops subsidizing this, it means that fewer people will use it and fewer cars will be in the area. That means drivers would have to drive an extra 10-15 minutes to get to me. That's a lot of driving time without getting paid, and drivers don't like that. That's why taxis never came to my house, pre-Uber.
It still doesn't make sense at higher prices. Pre-Uber, I would pay limo services $60-$100 just to ensure someone showed up. That's not something most people would pay to use regularly. That $14 price can't jump to $60 and still get many customers.
So when the cuts come, I just imagine that my neighborhood will just go back to they-don't-show level service like I used to get with Yellow Cab. And I expect to just start seeing "nothing available, sorry" in the app, resorting to arrangements with limo companies again.
Gig work and all that implies would be more tolerable in the US if we had a universal health care system and worked hard to craft policies to make housing affordable (not an investment).
Until that world comes to pass, the slow but growing movement to treat gig workers as employees will only get bigger and bigger.
I doubt even in 20 years we'll have fully autonomous driving cars in every jurisdiction. If I were Uber or another company who relies on gig work to exist, I would be pouring money into lobbying for universal health care. That would ease the pressure considerably.
> Why should we, as a country, want low paying jobs that only support people with subsidies from others?
Because the alternative for the people taking those jobs is often no paying jobs where you need to subsidize the entirety of the needs of such people instead of just subsidizing what wasn't covered by the low paying job.
Making low paying jobs illegal doesn't magically result in the creation of well paying jobs.
Allows me to give the credibility to the article it deserves.
For me Uber already lost a customer for life due to horrendous customer service that showed a corporate culture of the worst once I picked thru it all. So for me they are already dead.
Their business model: request a ride, pay for a ride, is not doomed. Their low prices might be. Yes, their economics pitched to investors relied on automation that's not here, but for medium density spaces, cabs have so much more overhead and will struggle to keep up unless they have a platform/brand that is competitive with lyft and uber.
Also adding that perhaps the biggest unnoticed feature with uber and lyft is the feedback loop. Good drivers and good riders stay on the platform, which is good for the users. The Cab experience on the other hand is some guy mumbling (best case) into an ear peice the whole ride while accelerating/braking like they are driving an indy car, all while getting into a sticky back seat and needing to settle up akwardly at the end of the ride. If cabs are going to take back some market share, they need to invest in their experience.
It's not even the underlying business model that's unsound. People will always need to get from point A to B, and the app based ride hailing model has completely revolutionized the fulfillment of this fundamental need. That's not going anywhere. Uber's problem is in their scale. You get essentially zero benefits and all of the drawbacks from massive scale in this industry, with the fact that your technology is trivially replicable by competitors, and brand loyalty is almost non existent. Uber is doomed in its' current incarnation. But my bet is that the future for ride hailing is one of hundreds of different competing local services around the world that focus on their locality, work directly with local officials and regulators, and provide good customer service while keeping overhead extremely low and operating profitably.
> But my bet is that the future for ride hailing is one of hundreds of different competing local services around the world that focus on their locality, work directly with local officials and regulators, and provide good customer service while keeping overhead extremely low and operating profitably.
I would argue that this is Uber's bet also. I like to joke that Uber is sort of a ridesharing index fund, since they own large minority positions in nearly every competitor / market leader in localities in which they "lost" (Didi, Grab, Yandex).
The model is unsound. Private vehicles on roads in cities cause a ton of pollution (and I don't mean CO2) that is very undesirable. Public/mass transport with good mechanisms for short journeys to and from hubs is a better model. The rise of ebikes and scooters is an encouraging alternative here too.
Yes of course there are times when people need a car, but they are not the majority of the time for the majority of people. And their severe externalities need to be priced in to discourage use.
>Public/mass transport with good mechanisms for short journeys to and from hubs is a better model.
Maybe in Europe or Asia. But in the US, private vehicles are the only viable option for a huge portion of the population. Our entire society is built around it. The density simply isn't there for public transit to make any sense, and distances are far too vast for scooters/e-bikes to work.
Only in a world where more profitable opportunities for investment are sorely lacking can such wild bets on far-flung futuristic technologies become massive multinational companies. Corporations and wealthy individuals have accumulated huge sums of money and cannot figure out where to put it because returns on investments are extremely low. The flip side of falling rates of business investment is a slackening pace of economic growth, which economists have termed “secular stagnation.” It’s this decades-long slowdown that has generated the insecure labour force on which Uber and Lyft rely.
Now that's a very important statement. It's correct.
First, how US-specific is this? Is it true for the EU? Japan? China? India?
Second, why are profitable opportunities for investment lacking? Why are people not building larger solar panels and wind farms in the US? Why is it taking so long to get electric cars going? Why are there no new home appliance companies in the US? Why isn't the return on investment there?
Maybe those other things needs much larger initial investments. Meanwhile investors see software startups that scale from two people up to thousands as the concept it proven.
The US has a tax system that discourages production and stimulates financial investments. That's why it is so easy to create bubbles on companies that have no solid business future. As long as the stock goes up, people think everything is ok, and many will make money. The losses will be left in the hands of later investors and the government (through bail outs).
In Germany the economy is geared towards production. Companies that do something real have benefits. Purely investment activities (financial industry) have to pay higher taxes. This makes the country more productive. In the US, the first thing everyone does is to move production out of the country and put their money on financial investments. It is great for investors because of the higher profit margins, but terrible for the economy in general.
A big cohort of economists would argue that the recent[1] German success comes in big parts because of the Eurozone, and how Germany is draining the Italian[2] industry because the Euro is too strong of a currency for Italy (because of cultural reasons, regarding saving behavior along others, Italy has been used to a way higher level of inflation than what Germans could withstand).
[1]yes recent, the situation was way different in the early 80s
[2] this applies to France too, but to a lesser extent.
The foundation for solid returns on investment is a large population with the disposable income to buy products that they did not previously purchase.
Since the neoliberal revolution in the 1980s, disposable income for the median person has stagnated or fallen, to varying extents, in the anglosphere. While nominal compensation has risen, these gains have been consumed by inflation and massive increases in unavoidable expenses. In most Anglosphere countries, cost increases for housing, food, transportation, and communications have consumed most wage gains. In the US, the situation has been made far worse by explosive growth in the costs of education and healthcare. In addition, government policies to support the reformation of extractive monopolies for products and monopsonies for labor have further reduced wages and buying power.
The net result is that the bulk of the population is too financially strained to expand their spending to provide a return on investment for companies that create new products and new markets. The median person lives in a stagnating, or even shrinking, economy and all spending is zero sum. Buying the next Shiny Widget means doing without something else, and that's a choice most people can't afford to make.
If capital wants greater returns on investment it needs to redistribute some of its gains to the public in the form of wages and other compensation. Capital, however, has refused to do this and has instead opted for rentier economic strategies that seek to seize a greater percentage of the economic pie for monopolists instead of growing the pie for everyone.
The solution is policies that lower income inequality and reverse re-monopolization, but that's a political third rail that no politician can afford to touch on pain of losing support from the donor class. For an example of how well these ideas fare in American politics, look at the fate of Elizabeth Warren's presidential campaign bid.
>Second, why are profitable opportunities for investment lacking?
Because ambitious technological progress requires coordination between state, business and large scale entities. The cultural shift from the late 70s onward pushed consumer-led economic growth and withdrawal of the government from economic activity.
If you look at inventions like the internet or satellite tech, much of it was military/government-led R&D with all the consumer stuff essentially being a byproduct that fell out of it. Federal r&d budget in the US constituted 12% in 1965 and just about 4% today.
so at the end of the day you have the death of the research lab, fundamental science, large state-led programs and so on in favour of people building smartphone apps because they're cheap to make, you can spread them across the globe a few people get very rich, they build themselves a huge HQ in Silicon Valley and you get the illusion of having 'tech progress' while your scientific and physical infrastructure rots away. It's worse in the US than it is in Europe or Japan because Europe/Japan have at least kept part of their manufacturing culture. China is if anything the only country that looks sort of optimistic on that front, although it also has countless of problems as society gets more affluent.
Out of curiosity, what technological investments do you think the government could be making today that would have the impact that satellites and the internet could have?
I ask because the way I see it there are some pretty fundamental differences between now and the 1970s.
The way I see it, progress is made not so much by companies or government but by those individuals with the intellect and gumption to invent the future. All that matters is that there exist organizations, be it corporations or the government, willing to invest money on big bold bets that attract such ambitious individuals and create conditions for them to collaborate.
At times in history, private industry achieved it (Bell Labs, Ford, Google, Facebook, Tesla) at other times the government/military achieved it (Manhattan Project, NASA, DARPA, etc.)
If government got heavily involved it would contribute just by putting more money in the ring, but I don't see how it would achieve more than corporations putting more money in the ring. End of the day, it's the money being put in the ring that matters most, not who is putting the money in the ring.
Not saying, I'm against more money chasing ambitious ideas, I just fail to see the argument that government is any better than private industry here. The one advantage I do see of government is that they'll generally allow money to be spent far more recklessly for longer than private industry and if that's not your money, then that is something that is more likely to produce an occasional great technological outcome.
Government lays out the foundation upon which innovation can take place. They build out shared infrastructure and provide research funding to universities, which private corporations get to use to create profitable things in the real world.
Using your examples, Ford wouldn't have been successful without the massive government investments in our roads, and the internet companies wouldn't have been successful without all the publicly funded computer science research over the past half century.
We're probably overdue for some wide-scale government investments in renewable tech, and I'd personally love to see a substantial government initiative to not only modernize our digital infrastructure (the average household internet connection in the U.S. is ~7 Mbps), but really push it into the future, whether it's via fiber, public wifi blankets over dense urban areas, cell towers, satellites, or some combination thereof.
>what technological investments do you think the government could be making today that would have the impact that satellites and the internet could have?
maybe nuclear fission, make it the goal to create cheap, clean and abundant energy, maybe a model city with new modes of transport, Gigabit internet everywhere, a space elevator, an arcology, much more interest in alternative new ways of agricultural production, a DARPA for construction and infrastructure.
There are so many things that essentially work the same way they did 50 years ago. I can't remember who said it but someone said, take the screens out of a room and you can't tell if you're in 1970 or 2020.
Private business tries to tackle some of the things on that list but without backing by a state it never goes anywhere, and they do it more out of vanity or because they have eccentric founders rather than any economic sense, these are societal tasks.
Also foster a culture that admires scientific excellence and inquiry over getting rich and being a celebrity by making science again the focus of the education system. There's also a cultural component to this everything else aside.
What technological investments do you think the government could be making today that would have the impact that satellites and the internet could have?
* Vaccines for addiction. A vaccine against cocaine addiction was developed in 2009 but was not effective enough.[1]
* Preventing aging. Aging is mostly a timeout, not a wear-out.
* Average US East Asian IQ 105. Average white IQ 99. Average black IQ 85-90. Why? Fixable?
* Automated education which actually works.
* Wireless power transmission that works. Not much power, but enough to eliminate the need for small batteries in everything.
* Ways to force a decision in a guerilla war.
* A way to make building roofs that last a century.
> Second, why are profitable opportunities for investment lacking?
Because the economy isn't growing much? And this may be because productivity kind of plateaued due to lack of automation: most growth we've ever had came from automation, windmills, steam machines, robotized factories, etc. But now that the biggest part of Western economies is services, we're kind of stuck because automation in services is way less efficient than what we got in agriculture and manufacturing.
People are often afraid that IA would cause too much automation and destroy jobs, but in fact I believe that we (and Capitalism) are now suffering from too little automation (and I don't expect things to change soon unfortunately because AI is far from advancing fast enough for what's needed).
Too much concentration of wealth and assets and way too much indebtedness. Consumer spending is maxed out in the US. A thought experiment: If you own the world, what would you want to do? Solar energy for those who have nothing to give you in return or space exploration or something else you fancy? This had happened before in the US around 1929. There are some old federal reserve documents that describe exactly this situation. War, inflation, devaluation, and redistribution was the way out.
This is definitely a bigger problem in EU. Greece and Italy are top of the list with this problem and could benefit from a devaluation.
> Why is it taking so long to get electric cars going?
Laws of physics haven't changed the way entrepreneurs would like them to change.
Theoretical energy density of an electric battery is low. Practical energy density of electric batteries today is even lower that that. There is no specific known approach to make better batteries, everyone experiments, and tests, and experiments, and tests over and over again hoping to discover a magical combination that keeps lithium stable.
Unless someone discovers a completely new physical effect (I wouldn't bet on that), electric cars are never going to be versatile. And if there is a discovery like that, I doubt they are going to rush to implement new technology in, essentially, rich consumers' toys. There are more important areas.
I feel like electric cars suffer more from infrastructure problems than physics. If there were widely available chargers at both workplaces and homes (including the parking garages of apartment complexes, etc.), I think you'd see much more widespread adoption. It's not hard to imagine widespread fast-charge stations off the interstates, or even battery-swap stations either.
ICE cars have basically a hundred years of infrastructure to lean on, and they'll continue to have a massive one-up on electric cars in terms of versatility until an equivalent electric infrastructure is built out.
he does not even bother to explain the premise: why uber drivers should be classified as employees. If that makes me really dumb, so be it. They're paid per job and have no exclusivity to work for one employer. How are they different from say, the plumber?
It seems to me that a big problem with the discussions surrounding Uber and Lyft is that so many people claim they know what drivers want, but it's usually based on little or no evidence.
Who should represent drivers' interests? Uber and Lyft? California lawmakers? California voters? Opinion writers? A union?
Even someone who is a driver doesn't necessarily know what other drivers want, since they might not be typical. Different drivers may want different things.
It gets even worse when we talk about potential drivers. Drivers aren't a fixed set of people. There are people who aren't driving now, but might, under the right conditions.
All of these have flaws. I'm pretty sure I don't know what drivers want, and the average person talking confidently about the issue on the Internet probably doesn't know either. As a result, very little commentary has any credibility.
This gets brought up often, and the other comment said is that most drivers say they like their uber gig and the freedom it gives.
I too have asked the question often and similarly gotten positive responses most of the time. But I have also learned that when you question a person's career choice they will almost never belittle it, presumably because that's an affront to their decision making abilities - it's a tacit acknowledgment that they have done goof'd with their lives. I've noticed it in other places too, where arguably similar bad permanent career decisions are made, viz academia.
The only question is if the government needs to be involved here to protect the people from themselves or not; my gut says no. Arguably the porn industry is far more predatory towards women (if documentaries are to be believed) yet no one's vehemently protesting to ban that industry, so I see no reason the government should bother with excessive regulation here (though some basic rules might not hurt, even the porn industry has some rules).
This could be said of most topics. At the end of the day, lawmakers need to weigh studies, polls and legal precedents, to build a vision of what kind of society we want.
Yes, you could say that representation in general is a problem with governance.
In corporate governance, this is talked about as the principle-agent problem - does management represent shareholder interests, or their own? Also, how should other stakeholder interests be represented, like customers and employees? Note that formal and informal power can be very different.
But it is also true of representative democracy, the courts, and every alternative you might think of. Governance is a tough problem and you should be suspicious of arguments that ignore the hard problem of representation.
I would like to see more arguments that at least talk about polls of drivers' interests, even though they are flawed too.
Yep, I agree. Drivers seem very unrepresented, except for a few lawsuits, which some could argue may not represent the majority (there is little data).
Sadly, politicians do use studies, polls and legal precedents, but they start with the vision of the kind of society they want and pick and choose which studies, polls and legal precedents give them cover for the policies they are pushing.
Partisanship has made this far worse since politicians aren't even forced to reckon with contradicting studies, polls and legal precedents because they can just dismiss those that contradict their vision as the work of competing partisans.
I think it's fair to assume that driver's want to be paid at least fair wages – or at least that they don't wish, all other things being equal, to be underpaid.
Now, whether or not Uber/Lyft can actually provide that to a degree that the CA legislature finds acceptable while still being a sustainable business is the question.
If drivers are required to comply with Uber's policies or choose not to drive for Uber, then it's not unexpected to require Uber comply with US / State labor laws or choose not to operate in the US / state. Legal specifics of what "comply" means in this case is up for debate, which is ultimately the court's jurisdiction – or in the case of Prop 22, the people at large – to decide on behalf on all parties, not Uber's and not even the drivers themselves.
> I think it's fair to assume that driver's want to be paid at least fair wages – or at least that they don't wish, all other things being equal, to be underpaid.
That is very subjective. Who’s to say what is a fair wage?
There are many people that are willing to drive for Uber/Lyft at current benefits.
And there are others who don’t drive for Uber/Lyft because they make more somewhere else.
Whose problem is it that some people want to drive for Uber and others don’t?
> It seems to me that a big problem with the discussions surrounding Uber and Lyft is that so many people claim they know what drivers want, but it's usually based on little or no evidence.
The thing is: The requirements that legislators are setting for employers are fundamental social security services.
Whether a worker gets paid sick leave and vacation, health insurance and unemployment insurance is therefore not up for the debate in most Western countries.
Some people may claim that they don’t need or want these services, but the reality is that everyone needs them as everyone needs vacation at some point, will get sick or fired.
And because of that it’s good that the law requires them to be mandatory. This is also why so many people from low-income households in the US have trouble to afford a visit to the doctor or vacation.
Those things aren’t a problem for most workers in European countries.
The whole system is broken. You are not rewarded for living well and eating healthy or exercising, you're penalized for other people's preventable diseases, obesity being a primary preventable illness that causes other problems.
Universal healthcare doesn't care about the causes of illness, it just cares about paying it's working for treating the illness. If there is no requirements for keeping health to receive health insurance, and everyone who destroys their body gets healthcare at the cost of those who don't use it because they're healthy, why would a healthy person with no illnesses want it?
I'd love to see prevention before it goes to healthcare, but try even mandating soda sizes in the US... The only way is to make it unpopular like supersize me (although he was shady and never showed the food logs).
Healthcare should be paternalistic by definition but American culture cares so much about freedoms they won't wear masks during a global pandemic so it's incompatible.
You failed to understand his point. As a worker I don't want any of that crap. It's good that it's mandatory because someone will need it? I choose to work at these places if I want because I don't want social security crap, and I don't have a schedule so I don't need vacation and I don't need to call in sick at Uber.
You like many who don't understand are putting it in the mold of a traditional job and people like you are not wondering why people choose to work long hours with no benefits, so you say everyone has to have certain hours and benefits, and are legislating without representing drivers or asking what they want. It has something to do with getting money now, not some far away 401k or social security. If I wanted European style wages I'd go to Europe where the problem becomes lower wages with useless "benefits".
If your perspective is this short-sighted, then the benefits are for society, not for you.
We don't want to be stuck with the bill when you have an accident that you're clearly not anticipating and realize that you were wrong in thinking that you "don't need that crap."
If you're not going to act like an adult on your own, then society is going to ask your employer to act like your babysitter.
It isn't short sighted, you just don't like it and try to use a moral high ground on the equivalency of why you should unfairly force me to pay for HBO when I don't watch HBO. "For society you need HBO, for later when you need it". How about you leave what other people in their lives need or want and focus on yourself?
Society isn’t going to be forced to foot your bill if you get bored and decide the only cure is HBO. Was that analogy made in serious or are you just joking?
If you break your arm society will be forced to pick up the tab. If you pass out and someone calls 911 for the unconscious person, society will pick up the tab.
There is no reasonable circumstances where you’d accidentally use HBO an subscription without intending to and force your neighbors to pay for it.
Is that not the problems with a broken system? Who is forcing who to save people? Why SHOULD society pick up the tab for my broken arm, or his obesity?
When the same drug addict that can't pay his bills again goes to the same hospital and has no intetions of paying and the hospital is forced to take anyone what is the result? A healthcare system that is more focused on duration of life at any cost, versus that of quality. Preventable illnesses like drug abuse, obesity and smoking are everyone's issue when everyone else is paying for the purposefully sickly to squander all the money.
Your argument comes down to "why don't we just let them die?"
You broke your arm? Sorry, no insurance. Figure out yourself how you're going to fix that. You might not be able to ever use it again, but that's your choice.
Cancer breaking down your stomach, leaving you in agonizing pain every hour of every day? Sorry, no insurance. Please be quiet, your neigbors didn't sign up to hear your screams.
Truck plowed into your car, leaving you maimed beyond recognition? Sorry, no insurance. We can't help you get home either, but there's a nice big hole outside the exit you could crawl into instead. Also here's the bill for cleaning the bloodstains you left on our floor.
We don't just leave people to die because it's both an ethical problem, and because it causes problems for everyone else.
In America it is anti paternalistic. Why is this so different?
Nobody has replied or will touch how we preventable diseases such as cancer from smoking and obesity are paid for by healthy people and are completely preventable issues.
Every single example you use deviates from the original, more and more as unfortunate circumstances, but most problems are not cars crashing into you. It's mostly people killing themselves slowly though sloppy eating, poor impulse control and violence. Yes you stuck your hand in a grinder, now the government will take care of you forever. You were putting on hundreds of lb over decades of eating crap, you get free lipid medication, insulin paid for with taxes of other people. Thank you for gracing us with your presence, for existing you deserve the best. Please continue to live as long as possible, we don't want to lose an important person like that.
This is the system you dearly love? It's going to implode, obesity rises and healthcare doesn't care, they simply treat them when they come, and if you don't have problem already the hospital cafeteria will put you in there soon anyway.
The downvotes to your comments suggest that people here either don't agree with your argument, take issue with the way you're presenting it, or both.
I'm not claiming a moral high ground, I'm suggesting that there's a flaw in your reasoning. If something you do or want places an externality on other people, then you don't automatically get to claim that behavior as a right just because you wish to be left alone. The other people who are affected by the consequences of your actions have a right to a seat at the table, and they're going to tell you to grow up, because you don't live in a vacuum. That's not a moral high ground, that's just how life works when you live around other people.
In this case, one externality is that when you or others like you get sick or injured without insurance, society picks up the tab. Society would rather not pick up the tab if they can force your wealthy employer to pick it up instead.
If you want to make an effective counter-argument, you need to explain why your position doesn't actually place this cost on society, or suggest a different way for this cost to get paid.
"But muh freedom?" is not a good counter-argument. "Why has society chosen to pick up the tab?" is a valid question, but is not a counter-argument.
My issue is the unequal application of insurance. We don't care about the reasons for poor health and instead treat it. I never once said "muh freedom" was the issue, and in fact point out that people don't wear masks even today. The problem is the culture of freedoms and personal responsibility has completed deteriorated.
Preventable illnesses like obesity, smoking are ignored as personal freedoms, and are allowed to run rampant while their preventable illnesses clog up the system.
Why is only helping the sick focused, at the middle of the story as if there is a predisposed amount of illness, and not on the circumstances that lead to it? People worry about single mothers but don't worry about them before they become single mothers. It's baffling.
It's even larger than that as the other types of jobs available to people who would potentially be gig drivers have gotten worse as technologically driven "improvements" in scheduling have more split shifts (work the lunch rush from 11-1, take 3 hours "off" and come back at 5-9 for dinner rush) and near term (find out the morning of) scheduling happening.
It's impossible to plan for childcare, education, or whatever else with those sorts of setups.
Pardon the very basic question, but as someone who just casually sees articles pop up about Uber, I genuinely don't understand how the company continues to exist. Is this very rudimentary attempt at understanding of what's happening correct: investors keep adding funding despite regular losses because they're hopeful for a sizable return in the (far?) future?
On Uber's platform, the marginal cost for one ride, i.e. the cost for Uber to coordinate a ride, is tiny. Uber's cost of a ride are its server and maintenance costs, its incremental rider/driver customer support costs, and credit card transaction costs. These add up to less than 5% of the rider's total fare cost.
In developed markets, Uber takes a 25% cut of the total fare cost of every ride. The 25% cut far exceeds the 5% marginal cost of the ride. On each ride that occurs on their platform, Uber makes a 20% profit.
The more rides Uber handles, the more money they make. Last year, Uber managed 3 million trips per day on its platform. If Uber did 2-3x the number of rides it did last year, it would be a very profitable company. It has not yet reached this point (investors are still waiting).
However, Uber has very high fixed costs, mostly from its Silicon Valley salaries. Further, trips in developing markets are heavily subsidized and occur at a loss. Uber management has focused on cutting costs to extend runway & make profitability happen sooner.
Thank you, but so this doesn't answer my original question: how does Uber then continue to exist, given all the news I see seems to suggest that those fixed costs you're describing are leading to Uber not actually being profitable.
The 'rides' division of Uber is profitable, or at least, was profitable before Covid. The rides division brought in a net positive of $742m in 2019. Uber as a whole is not profitable since they lose money on their Eats, Freight, and self driving divisions. The Rides division has only recently been profitable; it lost money for over a decade and started being profitable in 2019.
Rides is profitable because Uber has significantly reduced subsidizing rides. They also have cut expansion in many developing markets. Finally they raised prices in developed markets.
See their 2019 Q4 financials - they now claim to make, on average, a 24% margin on every Uber ride.
A lot of people are saying Uber can just raise prices. Sure, they can, but Uber's not like other businesses. If Uber raises prices, then fewer people take rides. If fewer people take rides, then its harder for riders to make money. Even if an equilibrium is reached with fewer drivers and fewer riders at the same cost of labor, it's harder for Uber meet flexible demand and manage driver retention, and what not. It could create a feedback loop where higher prices require higher driver wages resembling economies of scale.
Uber is very clever. They've been able to automate the task of the slave overseer with the bullwhip. Dropping drivers who don't get enough stars keeps them in fear and working hard. Dropping drivers for refusing rides keeps them ready for work even while they're not being paid.
"Machines should think. People should work" - no longer the future, it's the present.
What about a ride-sharing protocol, like IRC? Seems like this is what is needed. We don't need a company here to help us hail a ride, we just need a standard way to hail a ride. We would then need to use our judgment as always. Caveat Emptor. I know there's little money to be made in the creation of an RFC for ride sharing. So much of the current Internet could be standardized in this way.
The hypothesis about self-driving cars doesn't hold water. Anyone doing practical assessment of the idea (as opposed to table talk) knows there won't be any, at least until all the infrastructure and human-driven cars are reorganized to inter-operate with automatic ones. “If the mountain won't come to Muhammad…” — unfortunately, it is possible that people will have to adapt to robots instead of the other way round if everyone decides that it really is the future. It might be that the author believes the general idea of “car sharing” to be correct, and struggles to find the reason why the company loses money. The problem is that the whole thing is a lie.
Their business model is not self-driving taxis. As with other “platforms”, it's just blatant cutting down on “irrelevant” expenses wile keeping the good bits to themselves under the pretense that they are just “operating the computer” that allows someone else to do “everything”. Uber might have a lot of money to smokescreen it, and keep the image of a middle-class citizen “sharing” the car for a certain price, but in other places competition between taxi companies rapidly “optimizing” and “professionalizing” the market makes it clear that humanity has pompously reinvented the hackney coach. Even worse, the unregulated hackney coach, when poorest peasants ride their carriages to a big city and work endless shifts trying to catch some passenger first to be able to feed themselves for a day, or some rickshaws fight and badmouth each other only to get the tiniest number of coins. A typical driver for a “digital” taxicab is a sleep-deprived immigrant (private person or an employee of an official subcontractor, there's little difference) wielding a number of burner phones running client apps from different companies (BTW, location spoofing solutions market is booming) who is useless without a navigation (hooray for modern bio-robots), but jumps every red light to shave minutes off. The real sharing happens between drivers — they share shifts, devices, accounts, and cars. However, the only important thing is that the big company gets the commission from each and every ride, so it's all good. They seem to make enough money to spend some on remediation when accidents happen, all while keeping their stance on being just a system operator that gratuitously helps clients. None of this is specifically modern. Immigrants working as cab drivers predate computers, and tricks that allow stretching of taxi car shifts are just as old.
Well, you can argue that there are ratings. (John Doe rated this driver 1/5: We both died in a car crash. Would not recommend.) Well, anyone in any kind of “digital marketplace” business can tell you that the whole point of stars, likes, and the like is to make users believe that there is a complex system that protects them in the background, and that their input matters. The fact is, the owner and only the owner of the system decides whether any of that is used, and to what extent. Say, how are upvotes and downvotes on Youtube videos used? They are just a game, something for users to fidget and feel satisfaction from.
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[ 2.1 ms ] story [ 155 ms ] threadThey should instead accept that their value to the world is they unified the taxi system and turned it into a global service that drivers can use. They should focus on their core business and figure out their issues with drivers and employees. They could cut the FSD costs and instead partner with Google or some other company. Or they could wait and also partner with any other car manufacturer out there that gets to FSD market. These companies could be huge buyers of the tech when available and so auto manufacturers will fall over themselves to get their business.
I wouldn't say its doomed though.
[1] https://www.businessinsider.com/uber-lyft-self-driving-taxis...
Article Link: https://medium.com/swlh/socializing-uber-for-society-shareho...
I don't see how Uber's business model is doomed. If Uber and Lyft are forced to be less efficient, they will raise prices. Yes, their business would shrink. But how could they be forced out of business entirely - would people go back to using taxis?? At the very least, Uber could charge the same price as taxis and be superior to taxis because an Uber actually shows up when you want one.
"Uber announced a first half 2020 GAAP loss of $4.7 billion with a GAAP net margin of (-81%). Uber’s “official” full year 2019 result was a GAAP loss of $8.5 billion with a (-60%) margin, but these were based on problematic accounting that makes it impossible to evaluate Uber’s financial performance properly over time."
"Uber has now lost $23.2 billion in the past four and a half years."
"Nothing has happened to change the fact that after ten years, riders have always been fundamentally unwilling to pay prices that would cover Uber’s actual costs, that Uber was always less efficient than the traditional taxis it drove out of business, that its only “efficiency improvement” was to push driver compensation to minimum wage levels, and that its growth depended entirely on unsustainable predatory subsidies."
Yep, that's not a good business alright.
[1] https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2020/08/hubert-horan-can-ube...
Well they can't seem to manage to be come when you ask them to, to be clean, or to have a basic standard of politeness. Until recently they didn't manage to accept cards, and many seem to still greatly resent it, and they still can't manage to provide nice apps.
So I'm super skeptical that they can do it as good as Uber, let alone better.
It's like Uber's been so good for so long now that people have forgotten how offensively bad normal taxis are.
I‘m from Europe and I‘ve never felt the need to use UBER. Taxis and public transport over here are sufficiently good.
I'm not from the US. I'm from Europe.
Taxis in every European city I've ever been to have been fundamentally consumer-hostile. They refuse to accept your card (illegally in some cases), their vehicles are filthy, and their customer service skills are offensive. It's like every ride I take with them is some kind of personal inconvenience for them.
The less said about the awful black cabs in London the better. Rarely take a taxi in London, but if I have a lot of bags I will, and it's not going to be a black cab.
Don't have this issue with Uber, it gives me a rough price (which is pretty accurate IME). I can count on one finger the issues I've had (driver didn't turn up at Nairobi airport, claimed he'd been arrested, had to book another one)
I've had issues in Beijing with taxis - thinking back I suspect the main issue is that Uber just didn't exist in Beijing.
This has been true for the decade that Uber has been in operation yet no urban taxi company has built anything even close to a comparable app or experience.
Butts in seats is a strictly commodity business, whoever charges the least gets the ride. Just like airlines. The difference is airlines are roughly equivalently efficient, but Uber and Lyft are strictly less efficient than taxis.
The difference should more than make up for the cost of maintaining an app in the long term so I don't see any reason that some company can't eventually be profitable in this space.
Flywheel was (still is?) a too little too late attempt by taxi companies to stay relevant and as far as I remember, it didn't even work very well.
If that's the case then why do they have a -81% GAAP margin? [1]
[1] https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2020/08/hubert-horan-can-ube...
If they dramatically reduced both of those things, I don't see why they couldn't run a more modest and profitable business.
I have used taxis in many countries in Europe and Asia and never was ripped off.
On the contrary, I always had very good experiences.
You're the only person assuming anything - you're assuming everyone you reply to is in the US.
What city do you ride taxis in? Because the taxis I've ridden have spanned a range of tolerably annoying to downright abysmal experiences. Uber/Lyft drivers have unequivocally been more friendly, punctual, and professional. No taxi company I've seen can manage to make a halfway decent app or even guarantee that a driver will show up within an hour of me needing one.
Even if Uber/Lyft become the same price as taxis, I'll take Uber/Lyft any day over a traditional cab company.
I think what you are describing is a problem that is very US-specific and it doesn‘t mean taxis are that bad everywhere in the world.
European taxis are the absolute worst for trying to wiggle out of accepting your credit card. Ever time I get in a European taxi I know I have a fight on my hands.
And tipping, although appreciated, is not at all mandatory like in the states.
Apps like Uber are a major safety improvement over taxis. If I get out of an airport and need a ride, I can either hop in a taxi and pray I get to my destination safely, or I can take an Uber and have a paper trail of who picked me up and where I went.
I haven't been to a country yet where "professional taxi driver" was a benefit. What made Uber great was that the drivers were nice people, doing it as a temporary / side job in a car that they were taking care of personally, and not a professional cheater in a smelly 20 old, rarely washed car.
It tells more about the country you‘re in than taxis in general if it’s so easy to get ripped off for using basic transport services.
But I don't have these problems in any country with Uber. Uber solves the problem.
Sure taxi companies _could_ implement these features but so far they have not. Probably because the type people who are attracted to running taxi companies are not the same kind of people attracted to disruptors like Uber/Lyft.
From my personal experience I have a pleasant taxi ride 5-6 times out of 10 and a pleasant Uber ride closer to 9 out or 10. Even if the prices were the same I'd likely still choose Uber/Lyft.
The tech or overhead on Uber can't be that expensive so I really don't see why they shouldn't be able to pay decent wages and make profit.
1. Integration with mapping allows me to ensure I'm actually be taken to the place I want to go and not "taken for a ride". This is especially important when I don't speak the local language well or at all.
2. I can pay in a way which does not expose my payment method to the driver (credit card skimmers, muggings). I also can always pay with a card via the app, rather than having to struggle to find a driver who will accept a card payment or who won't extort me after the fact with "the machine is broken".
3. I can track my trips in a way which makes it easy to expense them, something that is a pain to do with taxi receipts (if you can even get them to give you one).
4. I have some idea of what I'll be paying in advance and am more resistant to being overcharged.
5. When I request a ride, someone actually shows up and I have a meaningful ETA for their arrival.
If you've never left your part of the world to travel elsewhere it may be difficult to understand just how frustrating, unsafe, and unfair the experience of using a taxi in most of the world is, but Uber even at the same price is a many many many times better experience. I hate taxis and avoid them at all costs. In places without Uber, I strongly preference public transport even for very long rides, because taxis are usually worse. I preference public transport everywhere when it's good, but there are many parts of the world with bad public transport and even worse taxi services.
When Uber starts to face its economic reality, I predict the first thing to go will be service in my neighborhood.
Uber has been subsidizing rides everywhere in the city. Which means that my neighborhood is excessively cheap given the low demand. I've paid $14 for what would cost $35 in a taxi.
When Uber stops subsidizing this, it means that fewer people will use it and fewer cars will be in the area. That means drivers would have to drive an extra 10-15 minutes to get to me. That's a lot of driving time without getting paid, and drivers don't like that. That's why taxis never came to my house, pre-Uber.
It still doesn't make sense at higher prices. Pre-Uber, I would pay limo services $60-$100 just to ensure someone showed up. That's not something most people would pay to use regularly. That $14 price can't jump to $60 and still get many customers.
So when the cuts come, I just imagine that my neighborhood will just go back to they-don't-show level service like I used to get with Yellow Cab. And I expect to just start seeing "nothing available, sorry" in the app, resorting to arrangements with limo companies again.
Until that world comes to pass, the slow but growing movement to treat gig workers as employees will only get bigger and bigger.
I doubt even in 20 years we'll have fully autonomous driving cars in every jurisdiction. If I were Uber or another company who relies on gig work to exist, I would be pouring money into lobbying for universal health care. That would ease the pressure considerably.
Dara already admitted to this in recode podcast.
I support universal healthcare from a humanitarian perspective. But it doesn't make sense to tax everyone else so that Uber can cut labor costs.
Because the alternative for the people taking those jobs is often no paying jobs where you need to subsidize the entirety of the needs of such people instead of just subsidizing what wasn't covered by the low paying job.
Making low paying jobs illegal doesn't magically result in the creation of well paying jobs.
illegal?
Allows me to give the credibility to the article it deserves.
For me Uber already lost a customer for life due to horrendous customer service that showed a corporate culture of the worst once I picked thru it all. So for me they are already dead.
Their business model: request a ride, pay for a ride, is not doomed. Their low prices might be. Yes, their economics pitched to investors relied on automation that's not here, but for medium density spaces, cabs have so much more overhead and will struggle to keep up unless they have a platform/brand that is competitive with lyft and uber.
I would argue that this is Uber's bet also. I like to joke that Uber is sort of a ridesharing index fund, since they own large minority positions in nearly every competitor / market leader in localities in which they "lost" (Didi, Grab, Yandex).
Yes of course there are times when people need a car, but they are not the majority of the time for the majority of people. And their severe externalities need to be priced in to discourage use.
Maybe in Europe or Asia. But in the US, private vehicles are the only viable option for a huge portion of the population. Our entire society is built around it. The density simply isn't there for public transit to make any sense, and distances are far too vast for scooters/e-bikes to work.
Now that's a very important statement. It's correct.
First, how US-specific is this? Is it true for the EU? Japan? China? India?
Second, why are profitable opportunities for investment lacking? Why are people not building larger solar panels and wind farms in the US? Why is it taking so long to get electric cars going? Why are there no new home appliance companies in the US? Why isn't the return on investment there?
[1]yes recent, the situation was way different in the early 80s
[2] this applies to France too, but to a lesser extent.
The piece argues the post WW2 period was exceptional, hard to disagree with that.
I'd say that it is because we've picked a lot of the low hanging fruit and picking the rest of the fruit requires greater effort.
I don't think it's reasonable to think we're going to pick the rest of the fruit without some fundamental breakthroughs, likely in fields like AI.
Since the neoliberal revolution in the 1980s, disposable income for the median person has stagnated or fallen, to varying extents, in the anglosphere. While nominal compensation has risen, these gains have been consumed by inflation and massive increases in unavoidable expenses. In most Anglosphere countries, cost increases for housing, food, transportation, and communications have consumed most wage gains. In the US, the situation has been made far worse by explosive growth in the costs of education and healthcare. In addition, government policies to support the reformation of extractive monopolies for products and monopsonies for labor have further reduced wages and buying power.
The net result is that the bulk of the population is too financially strained to expand their spending to provide a return on investment for companies that create new products and new markets. The median person lives in a stagnating, or even shrinking, economy and all spending is zero sum. Buying the next Shiny Widget means doing without something else, and that's a choice most people can't afford to make.
If capital wants greater returns on investment it needs to redistribute some of its gains to the public in the form of wages and other compensation. Capital, however, has refused to do this and has instead opted for rentier economic strategies that seek to seize a greater percentage of the economic pie for monopolists instead of growing the pie for everyone.
The solution is policies that lower income inequality and reverse re-monopolization, but that's a political third rail that no politician can afford to touch on pain of losing support from the donor class. For an example of how well these ideas fare in American politics, look at the fate of Elizabeth Warren's presidential campaign bid.
Because ambitious technological progress requires coordination between state, business and large scale entities. The cultural shift from the late 70s onward pushed consumer-led economic growth and withdrawal of the government from economic activity.
If you look at inventions like the internet or satellite tech, much of it was military/government-led R&D with all the consumer stuff essentially being a byproduct that fell out of it. Federal r&d budget in the US constituted 12% in 1965 and just about 4% today.
so at the end of the day you have the death of the research lab, fundamental science, large state-led programs and so on in favour of people building smartphone apps because they're cheap to make, you can spread them across the globe a few people get very rich, they build themselves a huge HQ in Silicon Valley and you get the illusion of having 'tech progress' while your scientific and physical infrastructure rots away. It's worse in the US than it is in Europe or Japan because Europe/Japan have at least kept part of their manufacturing culture. China is if anything the only country that looks sort of optimistic on that front, although it also has countless of problems as society gets more affluent.
I ask because the way I see it there are some pretty fundamental differences between now and the 1970s.
The way I see it, progress is made not so much by companies or government but by those individuals with the intellect and gumption to invent the future. All that matters is that there exist organizations, be it corporations or the government, willing to invest money on big bold bets that attract such ambitious individuals and create conditions for them to collaborate.
At times in history, private industry achieved it (Bell Labs, Ford, Google, Facebook, Tesla) at other times the government/military achieved it (Manhattan Project, NASA, DARPA, etc.)
If government got heavily involved it would contribute just by putting more money in the ring, but I don't see how it would achieve more than corporations putting more money in the ring. End of the day, it's the money being put in the ring that matters most, not who is putting the money in the ring.
Not saying, I'm against more money chasing ambitious ideas, I just fail to see the argument that government is any better than private industry here. The one advantage I do see of government is that they'll generally allow money to be spent far more recklessly for longer than private industry and if that's not your money, then that is something that is more likely to produce an occasional great technological outcome.
Using your examples, Ford wouldn't have been successful without the massive government investments in our roads, and the internet companies wouldn't have been successful without all the publicly funded computer science research over the past half century.
We're probably overdue for some wide-scale government investments in renewable tech, and I'd personally love to see a substantial government initiative to not only modernize our digital infrastructure (the average household internet connection in the U.S. is ~7 Mbps), but really push it into the future, whether it's via fiber, public wifi blankets over dense urban areas, cell towers, satellites, or some combination thereof.
maybe nuclear fission, make it the goal to create cheap, clean and abundant energy, maybe a model city with new modes of transport, Gigabit internet everywhere, a space elevator, an arcology, much more interest in alternative new ways of agricultural production, a DARPA for construction and infrastructure.
There are so many things that essentially work the same way they did 50 years ago. I can't remember who said it but someone said, take the screens out of a room and you can't tell if you're in 1970 or 2020.
Private business tries to tackle some of the things on that list but without backing by a state it never goes anywhere, and they do it more out of vanity or because they have eccentric founders rather than any economic sense, these are societal tasks.
Also foster a culture that admires scientific excellence and inquiry over getting rich and being a celebrity by making science again the focus of the education system. There's also a cultural component to this everything else aside.
* Vaccines for addiction. A vaccine against cocaine addiction was developed in 2009 but was not effective enough.[1]
* Preventing aging. Aging is mostly a timeout, not a wear-out.
* Average US East Asian IQ 105. Average white IQ 99. Average black IQ 85-90. Why? Fixable?
* Automated education which actually works.
* Wireless power transmission that works. Not much power, but enough to eliminate the need for small batteries in everything.
* Ways to force a decision in a guerilla war.
* A way to make building roofs that last a century.
* A way to make roads that last a century.
That's a start.
[1] https://www.nih.gov/news-events/nih-research-matters/cocaine...
Because the economy isn't growing much? And this may be because productivity kind of plateaued due to lack of automation: most growth we've ever had came from automation, windmills, steam machines, robotized factories, etc. But now that the biggest part of Western economies is services, we're kind of stuck because automation in services is way less efficient than what we got in agriculture and manufacturing.
People are often afraid that IA would cause too much automation and destroy jobs, but in fact I believe that we (and Capitalism) are now suffering from too little automation (and I don't expect things to change soon unfortunately because AI is far from advancing fast enough for what's needed).
This is definitely a bigger problem in EU. Greece and Italy are top of the list with this problem and could benefit from a devaluation.
Theoretical energy density of an electric battery is low. Practical energy density of electric batteries today is even lower that that. There is no specific known approach to make better batteries, everyone experiments, and tests, and experiments, and tests over and over again hoping to discover a magical combination that keeps lithium stable.
Unless someone discovers a completely new physical effect (I wouldn't bet on that), electric cars are never going to be versatile. And if there is a discovery like that, I doubt they are going to rush to implement new technology in, essentially, rich consumers' toys. There are more important areas.
ICE cars have basically a hundred years of infrastructure to lean on, and they'll continue to have a massive one-up on electric cars in terms of versatility until an equivalent electric infrastructure is built out.
Who should represent drivers' interests? Uber and Lyft? California lawmakers? California voters? Opinion writers? A union?
Even someone who is a driver doesn't necessarily know what other drivers want, since they might not be typical. Different drivers may want different things.
It gets even worse when we talk about potential drivers. Drivers aren't a fixed set of people. There are people who aren't driving now, but might, under the right conditions.
All of these have flaws. I'm pretty sure I don't know what drivers want, and the average person talking confidently about the issue on the Internet probably doesn't know either. As a result, very little commentary has any credibility.
Yes.
I too have asked the question often and similarly gotten positive responses most of the time. But I have also learned that when you question a person's career choice they will almost never belittle it, presumably because that's an affront to their decision making abilities - it's a tacit acknowledgment that they have done goof'd with their lives. I've noticed it in other places too, where arguably similar bad permanent career decisions are made, viz academia.
The only question is if the government needs to be involved here to protect the people from themselves or not; my gut says no. Arguably the porn industry is far more predatory towards women (if documentaries are to be believed) yet no one's vehemently protesting to ban that industry, so I see no reason the government should bother with excessive regulation here (though some basic rules might not hurt, even the porn industry has some rules).
In corporate governance, this is talked about as the principle-agent problem - does management represent shareholder interests, or their own? Also, how should other stakeholder interests be represented, like customers and employees? Note that formal and informal power can be very different.
But it is also true of representative democracy, the courts, and every alternative you might think of. Governance is a tough problem and you should be suspicious of arguments that ignore the hard problem of representation.
I would like to see more arguments that at least talk about polls of drivers' interests, even though they are flawed too.
Partisanship has made this far worse since politicians aren't even forced to reckon with contradicting studies, polls and legal precedents because they can just dismiss those that contradict their vision as the work of competing partisans.
Now, whether or not Uber/Lyft can actually provide that to a degree that the CA legislature finds acceptable while still being a sustainable business is the question.
If drivers are required to comply with Uber's policies or choose not to drive for Uber, then it's not unexpected to require Uber comply with US / State labor laws or choose not to operate in the US / state. Legal specifics of what "comply" means in this case is up for debate, which is ultimately the court's jurisdiction – or in the case of Prop 22, the people at large – to decide on behalf on all parties, not Uber's and not even the drivers themselves.
That is very subjective. Who’s to say what is a fair wage?
There are many people that are willing to drive for Uber/Lyft at current benefits.
And there are others who don’t drive for Uber/Lyft because they make more somewhere else.
Whose problem is it that some people want to drive for Uber and others don’t?
The thing is: The requirements that legislators are setting for employers are fundamental social security services.
Whether a worker gets paid sick leave and vacation, health insurance and unemployment insurance is therefore not up for the debate in most Western countries.
Some people may claim that they don’t need or want these services, but the reality is that everyone needs them as everyone needs vacation at some point, will get sick or fired.
And because of that it’s good that the law requires them to be mandatory. This is also why so many people from low-income households in the US have trouble to afford a visit to the doctor or vacation.
Those things aren’t a problem for most workers in European countries.
In particular, health insurance being tied to employment seems US-specific and has a lot of drawbacks.
I'd love to see prevention before it goes to healthcare, but try even mandating soda sizes in the US... The only way is to make it unpopular like supersize me (although he was shady and never showed the food logs).
Healthcare should be paternalistic by definition but American culture cares so much about freedoms they won't wear masks during a global pandemic so it's incompatible.
We don't want to be stuck with the bill when you have an accident that you're clearly not anticipating and realize that you were wrong in thinking that you "don't need that crap."
If you're not going to act like an adult on your own, then society is going to ask your employer to act like your babysitter.
If you break your arm society will be forced to pick up the tab. If you pass out and someone calls 911 for the unconscious person, society will pick up the tab.
There is no reasonable circumstances where you’d accidentally use HBO an subscription without intending to and force your neighbors to pay for it.
When the same drug addict that can't pay his bills again goes to the same hospital and has no intetions of paying and the hospital is forced to take anyone what is the result? A healthcare system that is more focused on duration of life at any cost, versus that of quality. Preventable illnesses like drug abuse, obesity and smoking are everyone's issue when everyone else is paying for the purposefully sickly to squander all the money.
You broke your arm? Sorry, no insurance. Figure out yourself how you're going to fix that. You might not be able to ever use it again, but that's your choice.
Cancer breaking down your stomach, leaving you in agonizing pain every hour of every day? Sorry, no insurance. Please be quiet, your neigbors didn't sign up to hear your screams.
Truck plowed into your car, leaving you maimed beyond recognition? Sorry, no insurance. We can't help you get home either, but there's a nice big hole outside the exit you could crawl into instead. Also here's the bill for cleaning the bloodstains you left on our floor.
We don't just leave people to die because it's both an ethical problem, and because it causes problems for everyone else.
Nobody has replied or will touch how we preventable diseases such as cancer from smoking and obesity are paid for by healthy people and are completely preventable issues.
Every single example you use deviates from the original, more and more as unfortunate circumstances, but most problems are not cars crashing into you. It's mostly people killing themselves slowly though sloppy eating, poor impulse control and violence. Yes you stuck your hand in a grinder, now the government will take care of you forever. You were putting on hundreds of lb over decades of eating crap, you get free lipid medication, insulin paid for with taxes of other people. Thank you for gracing us with your presence, for existing you deserve the best. Please continue to live as long as possible, we don't want to lose an important person like that. This is the system you dearly love? It's going to implode, obesity rises and healthcare doesn't care, they simply treat them when they come, and if you don't have problem already the hospital cafeteria will put you in there soon anyway.
This bad-faith argument is so appalling that I hope this is a troll account.
I'm not claiming a moral high ground, I'm suggesting that there's a flaw in your reasoning. If something you do or want places an externality on other people, then you don't automatically get to claim that behavior as a right just because you wish to be left alone. The other people who are affected by the consequences of your actions have a right to a seat at the table, and they're going to tell you to grow up, because you don't live in a vacuum. That's not a moral high ground, that's just how life works when you live around other people.
In this case, one externality is that when you or others like you get sick or injured without insurance, society picks up the tab. Society would rather not pick up the tab if they can force your wealthy employer to pick it up instead.
If you want to make an effective counter-argument, you need to explain why your position doesn't actually place this cost on society, or suggest a different way for this cost to get paid.
"But muh freedom?" is not a good counter-argument. "Why has society chosen to pick up the tab?" is a valid question, but is not a counter-argument.
Why is only helping the sick focused, at the middle of the story as if there is a predisposed amount of illness, and not on the circumstances that lead to it? People worry about single mothers but don't worry about them before they become single mothers. It's baffling.
It's impossible to plan for childcare, education, or whatever else with those sorts of setups.
In developed markets, Uber takes a 25% cut of the total fare cost of every ride. The 25% cut far exceeds the 5% marginal cost of the ride. On each ride that occurs on their platform, Uber makes a 20% profit.
The more rides Uber handles, the more money they make. Last year, Uber managed 3 million trips per day on its platform. If Uber did 2-3x the number of rides it did last year, it would be a very profitable company. It has not yet reached this point (investors are still waiting).
However, Uber has very high fixed costs, mostly from its Silicon Valley salaries. Further, trips in developing markets are heavily subsidized and occur at a loss. Uber management has focused on cutting costs to extend runway & make profitability happen sooner.
Rides is profitable because Uber has significantly reduced subsidizing rides. They also have cut expansion in many developing markets. Finally they raised prices in developed markets.
See their 2019 Q4 financials - they now claim to make, on average, a 24% margin on every Uber ride.
https://investor.uber.com/news-events/news/press-release-det...
Uber as a whole can become profitable at any time by cutting their money-losing divisions.
"Machines should think. People should work" - no longer the future, it's the present.
Their business model is not self-driving taxis. As with other “platforms”, it's just blatant cutting down on “irrelevant” expenses wile keeping the good bits to themselves under the pretense that they are just “operating the computer” that allows someone else to do “everything”. Uber might have a lot of money to smokescreen it, and keep the image of a middle-class citizen “sharing” the car for a certain price, but in other places competition between taxi companies rapidly “optimizing” and “professionalizing” the market makes it clear that humanity has pompously reinvented the hackney coach. Even worse, the unregulated hackney coach, when poorest peasants ride their carriages to a big city and work endless shifts trying to catch some passenger first to be able to feed themselves for a day, or some rickshaws fight and badmouth each other only to get the tiniest number of coins. A typical driver for a “digital” taxicab is a sleep-deprived immigrant (private person or an employee of an official subcontractor, there's little difference) wielding a number of burner phones running client apps from different companies (BTW, location spoofing solutions market is booming) who is useless without a navigation (hooray for modern bio-robots), but jumps every red light to shave minutes off. The real sharing happens between drivers — they share shifts, devices, accounts, and cars. However, the only important thing is that the big company gets the commission from each and every ride, so it's all good. They seem to make enough money to spend some on remediation when accidents happen, all while keeping their stance on being just a system operator that gratuitously helps clients. None of this is specifically modern. Immigrants working as cab drivers predate computers, and tricks that allow stretching of taxi car shifts are just as old.
Well, you can argue that there are ratings. (John Doe rated this driver 1/5: We both died in a car crash. Would not recommend.) Well, anyone in any kind of “digital marketplace” business can tell you that the whole point of stars, likes, and the like is to make users believe that there is a complex system that protects them in the background, and that their input matters. The fact is, the owner and only the owner of the system decides whether any of that is used, and to what extent. Say, how are upvotes and downvotes on Youtube videos used? They are just a game, something for users to fidget and feel satisfaction from.