My take on the productivity paradox is software is a form of literacy.
We have put a pen and paper onto every desktop and every pocket but almost no-one can read or write.
Edit: And those that can find that only a tiny fraction of the fold is written down (accessible through the virtual cyber world). Amazon's secret to success was forcing every service to live behind a "public" API.
I disagree that writing software is comparable to literacy.
I think it's more similar to any other profession, with a skillset you can learn if you're interested, or learn to get paid.
Not everyone is interested in writing software, and that's fine.
It has also never been easier to tinker with things, as root VMs are cheaply available, in comparison to 20 years ago, when you really were just given a cpanel interface, if you were on a budget.
Not writing software, using it requires software literacy.
How many people do you know that refuse to learn the software they use everyday? How many times have you helped a friend or colleague with some problem just by googling it even when you don't really understand what they do for a living?
It's not that we need everyone to create software, but it would unlock huge productivity gains if everyone stopped pasting screen shots into word. Excel might be the most important knowledge tool of our time, and almost no one knows how to use it.
I think learning has changed as well. It’s no longer a (traditional canonical) reference that’s most useful (though Microsoft surely has one on each version of excel) but rather “how do I formulate a search to help myself here?”
Programmers have been doing GDD* for a while. Other knowledge workers will catch up or be left behind their peers.
I use Excel weekly, but not daily. The last thing I remember googling in it was last week and it was (for the fiftieth time) “excel format as millions”.
Software used to come with big beautiful manuals. I remember getting Borland Quattro and the box was a cube because the manuals were so thick. I think there are a lot of benefits to printed references but for me the biggest was accidentally finding something cool while looking for something else.
> How many times have you helped a friend or colleague with some problem just by googling it even when you don't really understand what they do for a living?
I think sometimes it is also the case of knowingly what to Google for, and being able to pick out the correct answer.
For example, recently I was involved in a cache issue for an android phone. One of the answers on Google was to download some sort of cache cleaning program. Of course, I knew that this was likely to be a security risk, but others would have downloaded it.
People are naturally wary about this thing, so sometimes I don't mind if they'd prefer not to Google and implement a solution themselves.
IMHO software development is closest to research work. E.g. a software development company is much closer to a research institute or design center than an assembly line in a factory. Unfortunately in reality it's more often treated like a late-medieval manufactory, or at best a scriptorium in a monastery.
>I think it's more similar to any other profession
Could not disagree more. I run a small business selling used video games online, and come from a SWE/EEE background.
The fact that we've got processes in place that are built from the ground up to be scalable and automatable, as well as the simple Python scripts to perform this automation has basically tripled or quadrupled our productivity.
I could see much the same happening for a lot of workers who handle data, and as more people who have learned to code enter the workforce I'm not sure employers will continue to tolerate (for example) accountants who can't write their own report generators.
I honestly think what you're describing will take about 25-50 more years to happen, if ever.
Whilst people are getting smarter and more capable, HN is a bubble of people who'll put in the effort to do the stuff you're describing.
Systems like SAP/Salesforce and other mega ERP and management systems are filling that space.
I expect people will just be learning to live in ecosystems. Similar to whats happening with the cloud in the present day for developers.
In large companies, accountants already spend much of their time building custom reports for management. A lot are in Excel, but other specialized tools are also common.
Literacy is known at the top for things like the Iliad or the works of Shakespeare, but the major benefits are actually much more mundane, like allowing doctors to write prescriptions or being able to have instructions in a manual.
Similarly, you may never write an OS or a AAA game, but being able to just automate a teeny tiny bit of your Excel spreadsheet, that's where software literacy will benefit the most people.
The first uses of literacy seem to be enabling beauracracy. Taxes, business records, laws, standardising things. The art stuff seems to have come later.
That's a fun metaphor. I don't think it's _literally_ true :)
Adding software got easy because development evolved, and supply
exceeded demand. The "Internet of Trash" is my go-to example. Modern
engineering got so good, and we're surrounded by so much efficient,
durable technology that manufacturers ran out of ways to add
value. So they started figuring out how to:
1) add internet connectivity whether it's wanted or not
2) control and break things using software
3) extract profitable data from users
All of these just kick the can down the road toward more solutionism
without really innovating in the original engineering domain.
People have lots of things in their homes that they’re not experts at or even knowledgeable of. Most people have a hammer and nail sitting around, that doesn’t mean they can build a piece of furniture or build a house. I’ve got all the tools to make bread, but I wouldn’t even know how to get started without some practice. And the list goes on. I also have a real pen and real paper, but that doesn’t mean I can write a novel.
It does literally mean you can write a novel. from an early age you have been trained to write and construct narratives. You can write that novel. it yeah no one has trained you at Primary School to build furniture:-)
If we're gonna talk about literacy, we need to talk about how many people receive college educations, yet have across the board weak literacy as operating, functional humans. Not just reading, but in thinking itself, as well as care of their bodies such that they can think at all. Critical analysis is no longer being taught, or its teaching is failing hard. I meet quite a few people that simply are incapable of stringing together logical ideas greater than 2-3 concepts. And the concepts they use everyday, they barely grasp and have no foundational understanding how such processes operate or even continue to be.
This a pure education issue, and that includes eradication of the false education taught by religious backed educational institutes. The magical thinking taught by religious backed schools and universities create mentally constrained individuals who live in a demon haunted world and are dragging down all of civilization.
I think you’re on to something there. Most software available today merely does what free software already does, but with specific marketing to make it seem like something people need. For example, all of the below software categories are easily handled with either the software bundled with your operating system or a simple open source download:
- budgeting
- to do / productivity
- book / music / video game / etc. media cataloging
- project planning
- event planning
- file storage
- etc
When someone remarked once that most SaaS products are a front end to a spreadsheet, I just thought, “they’re not wrong.”
Now if people had computer literacy they wouldn’t pay $20 a month for a service their computer already does.
I think what’s truly missing is that all those apps don’t make sharing easy, and operating systems all suck at sharing, or when they’re ok at it (airdrop), it’s limited to nearby people, or not across OSes, etc.
Almost all SaaS are about easy cross-device, cross-internet, sharing, which all traditional apps don’t even try to be good at.
I agree that's a valid point and it totally makes sense why people pay for certain things. I'd also observe that SyncThing* obviates it, again for free, but more people would have to know about it and use it.
I heard the problem expressed as a good ideas shortage versus too much investment capital. Interest rates have been incredibly low since the 2008 banking crash, so where does the spare capital go? There's not enough innovative ideas around (that investors like) to absorb the money. So some of the cash is getting thrown at complete nonsense and the remaining good ideas are receiving excessive capital. So there's a lot of inefficiency in there.
I agree with that. Money seems to flow to "safe" products. Some minor iteration of payments, CRM, taxis or fitness.
How do you fix it when the incentives are skewed towards quick bucks? Government pushing certain industries has worked for China. There'll be a lot of opposition to that in the US I'd imagine.
That's not even remotely accurate. There's a huge amount of investment capital flowing to other sectors. Just because people aren't posting about it on HN doesn't mean it's not happening.
We talk about these things like they are separate closed systems when they are not.
It is an innovation and banking problem. There are all kinds of feedback loops involved.
The ridiculous amount of liquidity in the global system changes and distorts risk preferences.
It also creates these giant sinks of brain power that are just moving money around. We have had amazing innovation the past twenty years in electronic markets, hedge funds, venture capital firms, cryptocurrency. Think of how much brain power is being wasted just modeling capital structures instead of something actually innovating because there is so much capital moving around that needs to be modeled.
How much brain power is being wasted at hedge funds? I have read hedge fund manager Jim Simons say he thinks he has the best research department in the world inside his hedge fund. It is not that much different than dedicating the best research department in the world to playing better poker. It is an utter waste of resources and we see it all around us with the complete lack of innovation.
I don't know what you mean by banking problem but let me tell you the purpose of money once there are enough savings to fund every single investment. The money must be spent on something that is an end in itself i.e. consumption. All economic activity has the end goal of increasing the ability to consume. If you insist on saving and investing anyway then investment itself turns into consumption i.e. a recreational activity that costs money.
Mostly the demand pricing model which is up to 5x the cost of other local services, the absolutely abhorrent non-existent customer service, the 25% of the time when you order an Uber and it gets cancelled, the transaction processing problems which seem to go in waves of plague and the buggy as hell app.
And don't even get me started on Uber Eats which universally delivers cold, damaged food which is twice the price of going in the store and their customer support is so bad that it's nearly impossible to get a refund from them now even though it was 2 hours late and looked like it'd been delivered in a washing machine on a spin cycle.
I live in Europe and I didn't have such experiences at all (when in very few cases a car didn't arrive, I got refund very swiftly without any problems). Try other applications (Lyft, Bolt or whatever).
Having taken a $30 Uber to drive 15 minutes lately, when a taxi would’ve cost $10 or so, I don’t think they’ve ultimately created much value with their rideshare service. They’ve basically just moved the entities around, and now it takes a lot longer to get a taxi.
Ultimately this is an era largely of the conglomerate, it doesn’t matter who you are unless you’re one of the big fishes. Media, Advertising, etc. Its no longer small shops that are creating interesting and useful things, at least not at the rate they were. It’s more likely to be an expansion out of a big company into a marketplace trying to sip an audience than it is a disruptor changing any of the game. The disrupters that exist must get and stay large as fast as possible as well.
I’m looking for things that don’t scale. I think we’ve basically poured all societies money into anything that might scale. We’ve found we have run out of those things. And all the problems we have left are things like education, homelessness, lack of meaning, healthcare, etc. All problems so entrenched I’m willing to say at this point they can’t scale, and therefore won’t be solved. Maybe the next technological revolution will be a social dynamic. Who knows.
That doesn't sound right to me. The only place where you're paying $30 for an Uber where 1. it would have been possible to call a taxi, 2. the taxi only costs $10, 3. it's a 15 minute drive, is in the middle of a big city. In that case, why are you calling an Uber instead of using public transit?
Yes, Ubers are more expensive than taxis in some cases, but in many other cases, they can do things that taxis can't.
I see that as pretty easy, ship pre-paid vouchers to participants or digital ones. Have them scanned and then billed to customer. Nothing complicated with big enough operators if they want to sell such service.
You're right it is in a big city. A taxi meter except to/from an airport is almost always much cheaper than a rideshare. A cab that takes 15 minutes might require a 45-60 minute bus journey if you have to transfer.
It was $30 for the slowest uber or lyft before tip. Taxi fare is $2.60 + $1.70/km, so it would have been around $10 to make the 3.5 mile journey. There used to be enough taxi's in the area to just hail one.
> And all the problems we have left are things like education,
homelessness, lack of meaning, healthcare, etc. All problems so
entrenched I’m willing to say at this point they can’t scale, and
therefore won’t be solved. Maybe the next technological revolution
will be a social dynamic. Who knows.
Hoorah to that!
We need a "cultural revolution" that let's us catch up with our
technological advances. New forms of digital literacy will change
the idea that any technological advance is good for its own sake
to seriously asking "what for?" of any technology.
Mere "efficiency" and "inevitability" will be seen as dumb reason and
forms of technological ignorance.
Intelligence amplification (IA) will usurp "artificial intelligence"
(AI), putting human agency ahead of laziness and "convenience".
For now I think we have to go through this runaway period of
technology, to get it out of our system. Let's hope it doesn't kill
us.
>Having taken a $30 Uber to drive 15 minutes lately, when a taxi would’ve cost $10 or so, I don’t think they’ve ultimately created much value with their rideshare service. They’ve basically just moved the entities around, and now it takes a lot longer to get a taxi.
You forget just how terrible the taxi industry was prior to Uber. I would walk for miles rather than take a taxi. I would gladly pay 2-3x more for an Uber than taking a taxi. There are signs that traditional taxi companies are waking up to their enormous service issues, but it only took their imminent demise.
I never had an issue with taxis in most European countries I have lived on, so reaching 50 it is quite a number of taxis, and still manage to this day without ever having taken an uber, which I refuse by principle due to the way their treat employees.
In Finland Uber lead to deregulating taxi market, which to no ones surprise lead to worse service, less skilled drivers, less availability on average and more expensive service... Then again I suppose the Uber lovers want exactly those things and an exploiting entity to leech money in between.
Interesting that you mention Finland, given that I was regularly there during my Nokia days almost 20 years ago, and they are for me the top reference, maybe only similar to the time I spent on Norway also servicing Nokia customers.
This must be regional. My experiences are from the U.S., New Zealand, and Australia. Terrible, miserable service. I hate the old taxi industry in a very visceral way. If you're seeing good/better service in your location, and they cost much less than Uber, I imagine they have no issues staying commercially viable and you'll be able to keep enjoying their services.
Do you have any examples what was better? Of the reasons I could think of that would constitute poor service, I've had as many Uber's just not show up as I've had taxis. I've had as many very poor drivers in Uber's as I've had in Taxis. The biggest thing I can think of is the average cleanliness of an uber is higher than a taxi.
But like, the taxi meters are just so damn cheap compared to what ubers are nowadays, and thats with $6billion in losses per year. $30 is too much to go just 5 miles in 15 minutes.
* "That will be $[some outrageous and clearly fake meter amount].
* "My meter is broken. I'll just estimate it."
* "There is a $10 surcharge for luggage" / "there is a $5 surcharge for that neighborhood" / there is a $10 surcharge for cards." Bonus points when they only tell you after you arrive.
* Driving me the long way. This happened ~25% of all of my trips. It was particularly egregious before mobile phone GPS became ubiquitous.
* Unsafe driving.
* Stinking / dirty taxis
* The cars took hours to arrive, and often never arrived at all. This is probably my biggest gripe. If there is one thing I require, it's efficient transport from A to B. If they can't even do this, they shouldn't be in business.
I can count on one hand the number of times I've had any of these issues with Uber. I do agree that the price gap between taxis and Uber is increasing, but I gladly pay it. As above, I would gladly pay 3x more for Uber, so until the price difference arrives there, I'm sticking with Uber.
It seems like so many of the apps that come to dominate just make up for shortcomings unique to the US that then, with money, take over the rest of the west for no good reason other than scale to get 25 people at the top of those companies rich.
I’ve never seen the need for Uber. Taxis have never been an issue in the UK and the most successful firms in the city I lived when Uber was starting out already had apps. Literally the only thing Uber had going for it was masses of money to undercut the market and advertise to younger millennials - basically their excess money allowed them to get better distribution and cheat the market.
I’ve used Uber three or four times in my life and each time was a worse experience than a taxi.
Still way more friction than Uber where you setup a payment method in the app once and no actual payment is ever required to the driver, pretty much anywhere in the world.
Also:
1) how do you tell the driver where you want to go? I've found this to be a major PITA with many cab fares, especially if you drive to unusual destinations. I've met many a cab driver that simply are incapable of using google maps. Case in point: a month ago in a small European town where Uber is banned by the local thugs who run the town, I give my destination to the driver at the cab station, lo and behold, he proceeds to spending 10mn first asking and then arguing with his colleagues in the local patois how to get there. I tried to step in to show them on my phone, they basically ignore me, because they obviously know better. The fact that I;m in a hurry is the least of their concerns. Ugh.
2) How easily and quickly can you get cabs to pick you up exactly where and when you want, especially if we're talking less than 10mn delay? In a big city like LON that might not be a problem, but from experience, and I'm talking about European capitals, and smaller cities in the US or Asia, this is *way* worse than the Uber experience.
As a matter of fact, an Uber ride requires zero interaction with the driver other than agreeing that you're the customer and he's the provider.
Quasi-frictionless and immediate, which - in my book - makes it a winner in spite of them having a despicable corporate culture.
The price considerations are a different conversation, but AFAIC, I'm certainly ready to pay more for an Uber to get to that frictionless transaction.
The day a cab ride is as easy to setup as an Uber ride, I'll very gladly stop using Uber.
Absolutely disagree - taxis in the UK used to be awful, none of them had apps before Uber. Black cabs in London were generally good due to the high entry requirements but you could only get them by flagging them down somewhere fairly central.
Uber introduced competition which has massively improved all other taxi services. These days there's nothing special about Uber except its ubiquity so I don't care if it fails now. Ofc this doesn't excuse their illegal practices.
Maybe you were unlucky but I never had an issue at all in Essex growing up or Newcastle where I spent 15 years. Also Blueline taxis had an app before Uber gained market relevance in the UK and it was great.
If 87 in your nickname suggest your age then I guess you are not the target for Uber. I’m 10 years younger and almost all of my peers never used Taxi and take Uber/Lyft quite often.
That’s a bit of an absurd take. Uber entered the UK market in 2012 when he was 25 and you 15, surely he’d have been in the target demographic before you? I’m in a similar age bracket and everyone I know uses Uber rather than black cabs.
Ditto: Panther in Cambridge have always been reliable for the 20 years I've lived in the area. Same with the Ely firms.
Last time I tried to get an Uber in central London in the early hours of the morning two or three drivers cancelled before one eventually showed up after I'd phoned Uber support to complain. I'm not sure the phone call is what did the trick - in fact I'm pretty sure it wasn't - but what triggered that call is I'd been trying to get a ride for 20 - 30 minutes by that point. It sounds like this kind of poor QoS might be a new problem though: I certainly wasn't aware of it before the pandemic.
Uber actively modifies the earnings of their drivers in real time, which causes the drivers to modify their willingness to accept rides in real time. The reason those drivers are canceling is because between the time they accepted the ride and arriving to pick you up, Uber modified their earnings such that it was no longer profitable, or simply worth the effort to pick you up. Uber is a terrible "employer".
But Uber is horribly in the red financially. They disrupted a poorly ran industry, but didn’t produce anything that truly raised the economy… that’s the point.
It's not like people would be stuck in the house otherwise. It's just that people would have taken public transport, their own car, or went by foot or bicycle before. I'm very skeptical of this claim that Uber increased mobility.
It’s hard to get empirical evidence for the general claim that Uber increased mobility after adjusting for substitution effects from walking etc. However, I think one can make the case from economic intuition that price reductions generally increase consumption in a category of normal goods.
E.g - a reduction in the price of wheat will increase food consumption even after accounting for people switching from other crops. Conversely, an increase in the price of Lego will reduce the amount of toys the average child gets, even after adjusting for the substitution to action figure etc.
That's Uber's problem though. Essentially their billionaire investors subsidized car rides for lots of people. Maybe it'll work out for Uber in the long run. Maybe not.
This game is over. There is no way uber is getting a monopoly on taxi service. The popularity of uber has had the wrong effect: taxi companies are getting apps now, and other ridesharing companies are trying to get a piece of the action. There will not be a monopoly except in the places that are truly unprofitable to service.
Are there any slide decks or investor material out there that confirm this is the business model? I hear it all the time on HN but it just doesn't make sense. The barrier to entry in the taxi market is too low. You can't kill off competition and start monopoly pricing. The competition will always reappear.
I think it might be kept implicit, so investors will not start questioning it.
I think the logic is to own the portal to taxis and become a gatekeeper, by being the only app that the user has installed for hailing taxis. So the barrier to entry becomes large because you have to convince people to install your app.
You're absolutely right. I don't know what OP is going on about but no there were 0 taxis with apps at least in Birmingham.
I just checked with my friends too and not one person remembers using an app to call a cab before uber. It is possible that some company possibly offered it but it certainly wasn't a popular option before Uber and it was just awful using the taxis here.
You could just phone a cab, no? That's what I did anyway; it's less convenient than an app, but back in the day you didn't have mobile phones either so not much option really. I don't really see how an "app" is fundamentally all that different, and it's kind of an obvious thing to add once smartphones become popular.
I agree that Uber injected some fresh energy in a somewhat complacent market, but the real "innovation" with Uber is with its business model ("employees but not employees") and willingness to just ignore local laws. This I think is the real point of the article; for all the pompous bloviating about being "disruption" and "changing the world", the actual real change is actually not all that large, with many of the changes being of doubtful or even negative worth.
>You could just phone a cab, no? That's what I did anyway; it's less convenient than an app, [...] I don't really see how an "app" is fundamentally all that different,
It's more than just a substitution of tapping an icon vs dialing a phone number.
The Uber business model of non-medallion cars and geographic matching algorithm builds up a "distributed mesh" of drivers to serve passengers -- especially those who are not at typical taxi "hubs" like airports, convention centers, downtown hotels, etc.
Before Uber, getting from one suburb to another suburb using a taxi was unreliable. A traditional taxi dispatcher can broadcast a ride request from a potential passenger in the suburbs but drivers can ignore it and wait for the more lucrative airport-to-downtown ride for $50. Why? Because the taxi meter only runs when that passenger is in the car so it punishes suburb-to-suburb trips and instead, incentives them to wait for the longer airport trips. So hub-to-suburb and suburb-back-to-hub is "dead time" the drivers are not paid for.
A traditional taxi company -- even with an app -- doesn't build that geographically distributed mesh to the same degree. The economic constraint was the taxi meter.
When I was stuck in some distant suburb and had to use taxi companies, the way I "hacked" them to reliably come was to tell dispatch to tell the taxi driver I will tip an extra $20 for the ride. Basically, a form of bribery so the taxi drivers wouldn't ignore the dispatch call.
> When I was stuck in some distant suburb and had to use taxi companies, the way I "hacked" them to reliably come was to tell dispatch to tell the taxi driver I will tip an extra $20 for the ride. Basically, a form of bribery so the taxi drivers wouldn't ignore the dispatch call.
I find this interesting because on the food delivery side, this is kind of mental gymnastics the worker needs to do. If it is a busy evening hour, do you want to take a (small) McDonalds order? Most likely not, unless there is a nice tip. You could do at least two deliveries in the time you wait for the McD order.
I imagine rider side is the same way as delivery. Every worker has to do this sanity check if whether something is worth doing.
If workers are taking low reward rides or deliveries, it is probably because they think they aren't missing out on something better.
> drivers can ignore it and wait for the more lucrative airport-to-downtown ride for $50. Why? Because the taxi meter only runs when that passenger is in the car so it punishes suburb-to-suburb trips and instead, incentives them to wait for the longer airport trips. So hub-to-suburb and suburb-back-to-hub is "dead time" the drivers are not paid for.
Isn’t it the same for Uber? They don’t get paid to get to your location so the only advantage as a driver is being picking up someone in the area you drop off another passenger. Dispatch worked similarly but it had its limitations of its time.
One thing that was not possible that Uber does is ride sharing.
> They don’t get paid to get to your location so the only advantage as a driver is being picking up someone in the area you drop off another passenger.
That's why the GP talks about a "distributed mesh" of drivers. There's simply more Uber drivers than there have ever been taxis in most places. So in the age of Uber if you're in a suburban area there's a high likelihood there's an Uber driver near you. So there's a small amount of unpaid driving time for the driver. There's also a decent chance of them finding a return passenger at the destination thanks to a similar increase in the number of potential riders vs taxis.
> Because the taxi meter only runs when that passenger is in the car so it punishes suburb-to-suburb trips
Most taxi companies in the suburbs would be a flat rate that the dispatcher would tell you before you got picked up (or the driver would ask the dispatcher curbside), they often didn't use the meter.
In some ways it does though. Some industries corner the market through regulation. Ie it's impossible for a new competitor to start up that follows all the rules and it's that way by design. The only way to break into that market is to break the rules or buy out an existing business.
“Taxis have never been an issue in the UK” is a statement that does not match my experience.
Living briefly in London taught me that you cannot reasonably expect a hailed taxi to take you from A to B no matter how hard it is raining or how obviously pregnant the person you’re with is, if the taxi driver doesn’t fancy going to B, even if B is still within 20m of A.
Living for far longer in Edinburgh taught me that the credit card machine is manufactured by the same company that sells McFlurry boxes to MickeyD’s. This was still true when I visited Edinburgh again 3 months ago.
Uber seems to me to be abusive to their drivers. And occasionally to their passengers. But there’s a good reason they were so successful early on. They made my life, as a customer, better, easier, simpler, less encumbered with bullshit.
In some places with expensive unreliable public transport, the quickest & cheapest way (a group) into town was by taxi. Minicab to precise. The five minutes away for 45 minutes variety. The cancel without any notice. The sorry I don't take card mate. How about the ones who got hopelessly lost to charge you more?
The old way was awful and Uber got a hell of a first mover advantage.
You're sample is simply not representative. If we could go back in time to 5 years before Uber's founding, I could show you the taxi system on the entire west coast of the US was non-functional, from San Diego to Seattle, service, pricing, availability were all abysmal.
FWIW, I actually agree that the "Gig Economy" is riddled with problems, but at least in the case of Taxi's where Uber started, the existing system was rotten and in need of replacement.
Sure, but like I said - solving a problem in the US and then rolling it out across the globe just “because” doesn’t mean the rest of the world needed it, just mean you had enough money to outcompete even if your service is worse.
It would seem that many other folks in this thread disagree that Uber's service in the area you referenced is worse. I've never been to the UK, so I can't offer an opinion.
Most other countries have different companies like Ola DiDi etc which have localized models more suitable to the country theyre in. Uber actually failed to replicate its model in these countries
as a counterpoint, there were places like nyc where the cabs and black cars were very reliable, fast and cheap and there were both drivers and family owned black car bases that were keeping the overheads rather than see them sent elsewhere.
many drivers were first generation immigrants.. owned homes in queens, were putting kids through college, looking at their name come up on the medallion wait-list in a few years as a retirement.
The insanity was that medallions had monetary value in first place. Just imagine that you couldn't start software company unless you bought medallion from someone already operating one. Or any other business for that matter... As for each type of business there is very good reasons to limit amount of those...
that insanity was why there were professional drivers who were making a good living at the trade.
but i suppose if the only constituents you really care about are customers, the people getting rich writing dispatch/billing software and the people facilitating the construction of a massive venture capital fueled duopolistic takeover of an entire industry, this works too i guess.
again, in the nyc market, it was fine, if not very good.
most drivers i spoke to seemed to like the medallions as they offered some long term investment potential and a sort of seniority reward. there was of course big capital at play, but drivers could have complained to the tlc... what can they do now? file a support ticket?
For some people, yes. Black folks routinely had issues getting cabs to pick them up, cabs would ask where you were going before you got in and then drive away if the answer was Harlem or outer boroughs, of course you could barely find a cab in the outer boroughs, everyone's credit card reader was "broken", etc.
Meanwhile, many of those immigrants were working off of someone else's medallion for peanuts, so the medallion owner could book Nicki Minaj for his kid's bar mitzvah.
the issue with black people getting yellow cabs in manhattan was real, but tlc would also vigorously enforce any complaints.
i think total rent for a car was something like $260/day and $280/day with medallion. (i think this also includes insurance)
remains to be seen whether this is better than encouraging drivers to go out and buy a late model car on personal credit.
regarding the boroughs, you had to know how to live in the city. any bodega, bar or restaurant would have the number for the nearest black car dispatch and would often call for you... pickup was usually within 5 minutes.
anecdotally: yellow cab drivers often seemed like financially stable professionals who were often raising families and in a good financial position. uber drivers always felt like temps. black car bases throughout the boroughs were often small and family owned. again this is anecdotal, but i like talking to people.
Your argument is essentially that just because you don't need/like Uber doesn't mean it's useful? The problem Uber is addressing is not just a US problem - with Uber you essentially don't have to deal with all the shit taxi drivers pull, like refusing rides if they have to go to a slightly less profitable area, overcharging for rides for people new to the area/tourists, etc. Not to mention that with Uber you know exactly when the driver is coming, how much you will be charged up front, etc. You may not like how Uber is addressing these problems - and indeed there are fair criticisms, but ride sharing apps are most certainly solving a real problem.
Friends complain all the time that Ubers don’t show up, take forever to arrive and don’t allow you to plan ahead. I’ve literally never bad that problem with taxis. I can book ahead, they arrive on time, they take me where I need to go, charge a predictable price and if I’m in a town or city I can just walked to the nearest taxi tank and find dozens of taxis waiting to take me somewhere. Yes this is anecdotal but I just don’t see the problem Uber is solving in the UK
> with Uber you essentially don't have to deal with all the shit taxi drivers pull, like refusing rides if they have to go to a slightly less profitable area
I was born and live in the UK and will only take a non-Uber taxi as a last resort. Been ripped off one too many times by taxi drivers in my life. With Uber there is no opportunity to be ripped off.
The fact that I can often use Uber abroad is a massive bonus. It's almost a guarantee that you're going to be ripped off when using taxis in a foreign country.
I would only take an Uber as a last resort - even the few occasions I’ve used one it was flaky. I’ve tried another few times but there was never a driver near but and the one who accepted just didn’t show up, carrier on driving around doing their own thing.
If something was critical I would never use an Uber - I’d rather walk, or cycle if a traditional taxi wasn’t possible for some reason.
If that was a common experience, Uber wouldn't have grown to the size it has and we wouldn't be having this conversation.
I don't doubt that you have had bad experiences with Uber, and also that other people have. But you would find it very hard to convince me that people have better experiences with non Uber taxis on average.
Looking at the app store reviews in the UK of Uber, sorted by most recent
1* - Lost my trust
1* - Has gone downhill
1* - Uber Scammed me
1* - Can't get an Uber anymore
1* - The worst experience I have ever had
2* - Uber is deteriorating
2* - waiting times have increased
3* - Cancelled rides
1* Deteriorated over lockdown
etc.
All referring to the same problems I see, rides accepted by drivers, then cancelled a minute or so later.
Going further back, full of 1/2 reviews:
A sad Decline, Slow at finding drivers, Getting worse by the day, Scheduled trips are canceleld, Getting worse & worse, Most unreliable, etc
Maybe the occasional 3* but going back 6 months, "Uber is dead, No Longer the no 1 ride in London, Drivers keep cancelling, Cannot get a booking, Never any drivers, Never turned up, 1 star is too much, used to be great", etc. etc, those were back to October.
I'm not sure how long it's been going on (the same complaints go back at least a year on the reviews), but Uber don't seem to exist any more, otherwise they'd be concerned and change something to fix it.
Those latest 9 reviews happened over the space of 5 days. If Uber was generally bad, given the number of trips they're doing, I'd expect to see a lot more negative reviews in those 5 days than 9.
I'm not surprised to see no good reviews. I can't imagine people going out of their way to leave good reviews for Uber at this point. Their overall rating is 4.5/5 though
While I don't disagree with the article, I don't fully agree with it either.
The article cites a study on (USA) GDP as a metric measuring of productivity, however, GDP is a poor proxy measure of "things being produced". USA GDP includes financial services and consumer spending, so using debt to pay for things vs. producing more, can still boost GDP.
In the United States, pre-Uber around 2010, it was very hard to find cabs in certain cities and even neighborhoods in those cities. New York City had no problems, but as I had lived in Chicago and San Francisco with lower population densities compared to top tier cities in the world -- the only way to get cabs even a few miles outside the main downtown area, was to call taxi dispatch, if you knew their number -- it was even hard to look it up online -- and schedule a pick up, which usually took 30min+. The US taxi system was stalled at the time, and Uber forced it to start adapting to the smart phone era. The tragedy is that the people investing in and also running uber had their own pyramid scheme instead of pricing out the business correctly. They also didn't consider the social/gov implications -- places with good taxi systems didn't need them, as you alluded to with the UK, but they shoved into it anyways.
So Uber was an innovation, one that is trying to find its financial balance still. I'd never care to schedule another taxi pick-up for next morning, 16hrs in advance when I want to go to the airport.
But the article saying that uber innovation and having others try it on other industries is stymying productivity isn't completely correct either.
As decided by the people. They could have politically campaigned to change that, buy out all the medallions at fair market price and the redistribute them for free in sufficient quantity.
Fuck that. Medallions are licenses and the government can grant more licenses as they see fit. They don’t need to compensate people who already hold them for granting more.
Excellent addition to the discussion there. My point of view still stands. I just don’t see how it’s better than the existing taxi systems I used in my country pre Uber. One even had an app showing where their taxis were and you could hail one with a tap of a button.
You click a button, someone comes to pick you up in a few minutes. You know exactly how much you are gonna pay. Even if you are just a tourist. Uber (and other applications like it) is so much more superior to taxis that you cannot even compare them (unless you want to frivolously whine). They brought insane amount of innovation and I am so thankful for that.
I already had access to this exact experience with a taxi firm in Newcastle where I used to live pre Uber - so yeh, I don’t see what benefit Uber brought. Also, the firm that had that app had clean cars, with driver in clean clothes and they knew the roads well.
Oh, you had exact experience with one taxi firm in Newcastle. Superb. I had this exact same experience with Uber in different countries and different cities. "I’ve never seen the need for Uber.". Well, you are one of very few, pal. I can tell you that for sure.
We had Blueline in Harrogate too. And there was Apple Taxis in Exeter with an app. Ideally Uber should just be an interface that ties these different companies together.
At least here in Berlin, when I book via Uber, I'm told more often than not that it won't be an Uber picking me up but a normal taxi.
>I already had access to this exact experience with a taxi firm in Newcastle where I used to live pre Uber - so yeh, I don’t see what benefit Uber brought.
It seems like the benefit of Uber was that it provided better service for many who didn't have the superior taxis in Newcastle.
If all the other replies (including some UK ones) in this thread contradicting your personal experience don't convince you, would that be a form of solipsism? (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solipsism)
The same can be said about people complaining how taxis in their cities were dirty, inconvenient etc.
Now instead of having this patchwork, we have one giant monolithic taxi provider (Uber) that threatens both the good and bad taxi services of old. And because Uber is more than happy to subsidize rides thanks to VC funding having an equal/superior experience is often not enough to compete.
A very bold claim. I am not sure about the finances of Uber and how it impacts shareholders vs employees and how many people are getting rich off it, but let me tell you that services like Uber have been a God send as a consumer. The haggling with old school taxi drivers is one of the worst experiences one can have, not to mention that you have no idea what the prices should be if you are not local.
Uber and similar apps remove all that nonsense. You can disagree with their business practices or even how much they charge, but I hope apps and services like Uber do not die, EVER. I don't want to go back to being harassed by taxi drivers.
Yes, in certain areas that huggling was very common and Uber did help customers avoid it completely. Quite often the hugglers were attacking Uber drivers for disrupting their business practices.
They were available in London before Uber, and they had an entirely different model where they just franchised the technology for people in each city to use.
They were profitable, and were driven out of existence by Ubers blitz scaling, which still hasn't produced a profit :(
> I’ve used Uber three or four times in my life and each time was a worse experience than a taxi.
Every time I call an Uber in London, an extremely professional and courteous driver shows up within a couple of minutes in a Mercedes S-class or equivalent, at a price only slightly above that of a black cab.
I doubt that you can find a better taxi service anywhere.
I would say a taxi app is a good though obvious idea, worth pursuing. What was a bit surprising was the sheer scale of it. That crowding out point in the essay is very relevant, we are basically allowing the bully with the big stack to raise everybody out of the poker game, no matter how good his cards actually are.
If we want a functioning market, let a bunch of little guys show what they can do, don't let one huge guy scare everyone else away.
Dumping of service should outside very limited promotional offers lead to massive penalties. That is multiple times the generated revenue. Possibly distributed to proven operators on the market.
Taxis in Shanghai were terrible. They weren’t much better in Ireland. They didn’t stop for foreigners (in Shanghai). They refused to take you if they didn’t feel like going where you wanted to go after you flagged them down. Uber and its copycats made the world better by making the “regulators” irrelevant. Taking a good taxi experience from a thing in some cities in some countries to everywhere they operated was and is massive.
A big benefit of Uber is the fact it works in multiple cities. I was in a new UK city the other day, no idea where I'd get a cab from. Just opened Uber and booked one, and it worked.
Tried it again that evening and it failed -- multiple times the ride would be accepted, then cancelled. Ended up walking.
Looking at recent reviews for the Uber app it seems this is common, Uber has gone from being somewhere reliable I can get a cab, from Sydney to San Francisco to Singapore, to being something that can't be relied upon
It's incredible spending time in the undeveloped/developing world - all the problems and solutions that "gig" apps supposedly are good for live on to this day all over the world.
Need a place to stay? Ask around the village and someone will be more than happy for you to sleep in the spare room for $1/night.
Need a ride? Wait where the locals are, you'll get in a communal "taxi" with locals for 10 or 20 cents to the next town.
In the Western World there are apps for this kind of thing that funnel profits to mega corporations. In the rest of the world there are average people on the street doing it every day as part of normal life.
It's all sunshine and rainbows, while you are in your hometown and know which one is good, won't scam you etc.
I landed in India or Brazil a few times, with language familiarity limited to "bon día". Without local sim card. This trip would be orders of magnitude harder without Uber and similar.
I think innovative idea is to get people think they make money when you rake rake of 20-25% and they provide the service for peanuts. And then they kicked out if they don't do it well enough.
One of the most interesting insights to me about this dynamic of profitless, innovation lacking platforms came from reading a Varoufakis piece.
To him the reason platforms exist as they do right now is because they constitute a fundamental shift away from market capitalism to what he calls techo-feudalism.
Instead of thinking of companies like Uber as selling software and paying wage labour to generate profit, it makes much more sense to think of it as a fiefdom that extract rents directly from its users outside of markets, maintains unpaid or barely paid labour, essentially a techno-peasant class, and is funded by barons in the form of VC capital directly and the state indirectly.
Through that lens for the first time to me it made perfect sense why it isn't so absurd to have gigantic companies that barely make any profits, have no differentiated products or much of a workforce. The point of these new businesses isn't to dominate markets and sell things at great margins, it's to claim territory, extract value and then use that control to directly command users on your behalf.
The 3rd paragraph is incongruous with the 4th paragraph. If they are not generating profits then how come we accuse them of extracting rent and "maintaining techno-peasants"?
The major characteristic of feudalism was that power centers deteriorated and power was distributed to local lords insted of central kings. So how is having a single gigantic company more like feudalism?
Lastly, why come up with such convoluted theory when "too much speculation due to cheap debt" explains everything with much less gymnastics
> If they are not generating profits then how come we accuse them of extracting rent
because those are not the same thing. Feudalists don't extract surplus wage labor, they extract direct tribute from their subjects, and just like that the entire value of Facebook say, is in what its users produce on its platform. That experience is the actual rent they collect. Ever wondered why all of this stuff is free?
And power is deteriorating. Away from the state, which played a central role in organizing and managing the traditional market economy towards these private spheres of influence of which the principal unit is the tech-firm.
I feel like my mother posting about some cauliflower recipe would be much less useful tribute than a few kilos of rice. There must be some point to the tribute.
This stuff is free because Facebook is an advertisement company. I enjoy a good conspiracy as well but at least it must be somewhat entertaining.
> If they are not generating profits then how come we accuse them of extracting rent
Just as it was possible for a medieval king to have terrible finances by spending more on war/security than he collected in rent from Barons, a tech company can lose lots of money by spending more on customer acquisition/platform maintenance than collected in rent from suppliers.
I think this phenomenon is better described as indirect payment for platform services.
You could argue similar structures exist outside of tech in Walmart’s supplier relationships or Standard Oil’s railroad arrangements.
Also, the methods used by these companies to “claim territory” often does seem to create innovation. The gmail web app, WhatsApp etc create a lot of customer value despite being used for territory expansion rather the collection of direct revenue.
Uber and Lyft have made life much easier in San Francisco, since the taxi service here is very poor. I was in Vancouver a few years ago, before they allowed Uber and Lyft, and we had an extremely hard time getting a taxi there too.
I just find it really weird that there wasn't a thinktank in 2005 or so, that said "Okay, what are the next big phone applications?" and invented Uber and a few others. What is the point of these thinktanks if they can't predict 3 years ahead along our current technological advancement curve?
I have friends in South Africa who built a small business similar to uber in 2004 on SMS and future phones. Worked really well, however, at the end of the day an idea does not build a business like uber.
Extremely well executed startups does, which of course requires a team in just the right milieu and timing.
> I have friends in South Africa who built a small business similar to uber in 2004 on SMS and future phones.
(I assume you meant "feature-phone" there?)
You should tell your SA friends to reach out to some tech journos, they'd love to write a "Uber before Uber" story, and I'd like to know the reasons why their project didn't pan-out myself. SMS-based applications had a lot of potential in the mid-2000s, often the failures were elsewhere, and doesn't SA also have SMS-based billing too? that could have been an amazingly successful service...
I would guess they did not have the timing right with the advent of 3G internet with minimum viable bandwidth to be able to operate things like maps and GPS and payment processing in real time, combined with the advent of usable mobile phones with sufficient qualities of battery life, touch screen sizes, and computing power.
The 2007 to 2012 period was a perfect storm of bringing together connectivity with never before utility from newly developed devices, and if you were in the right place at the right time to stake a claim, then you had significant first mover advantages.
It was discovering new land that had not been settled yet, similar to when computing and society advanced to allow for computers in every home, and then internet connectivity, and then finally, 24/7 computing plus internet computing in your pocket.
Of course, having deep, deep pockets to hire the people at the forefronts of this land rush is also a huge advantage.
> advent of 3G internet with minimum viable bandwidth to be able to operate things like maps and GPS and payment processing in real time
I just realized that GPS was probably the reason: I remember my first time using Uber and it was the fact you could see the location of the car and yourself on the map in real-time, and so you could easily get to the car without the usual hassle of trying to locate and identify each other. That's just not possible with SMS (even if a phone did support GPS, I've never seen anything like "send coordinates by SMS" on a feature-phone, and even if the server could render a map it wouldn't be downloaded in real-time to be useful.
...though if it was a Java mobile app for each platform, that might have worked (even over GPRS), but considering how expensive mobile-data was at the time, hmm, yeah.
Yeah, if I had to guess, it was so extremely hard for them to recruit taxi drivers in South Africa. The metered taxi industry has always been extremely untrusted (my personal opinion), and basically non-existent.
They approached these guys and also the hand full of companies that existed back then, but it really wasn't until Uber established a trusted driver experience that we really started using taxis on a daily / weekly basis. So they simply did not have the funding / momentum to establish such a large scale transition in transportation and consumer trust within SA.
For years prior to Uber, the segment for "upper / middle class" public transport was not served and for sure not accessible. You could phone a cab company in Cape Town and get a taxi, but then it was super expensive and that was basically the only option – service which was also not available in most other cities.
When Uber arrived, they (and other companies) helped jobless drivers secure funding for cabs and within a year or two there were thousands of drivers, cabs and Ubers in all metros.
For the first time, when I had to go to the airport, I could get a Uber instead of asking a friend to drop me off. Crazy but this was the reality.
They create research that is used by politicians to justify them creating a policy they'd already decided to create for political reasons. They manufacture consent.
What did Chuck Colson want to do to the Brookings institution again?
Sounds like you're unaware what a "thinktank" does: they are political propaganda machines with enough funding to impact the pop culture fringe of whatever industry funds the thinktank. In the US, most visible thinktanks are GOP/conservative marketing operations, such as The Heritage Foundation.
"A think tank, or policy institute, is a research institute that performs research and advocacy concerning topics such as social policy, political strategy, economics, military, technology, and culture."
The first sentence of the wikipedia page for 'thinktank'.
IMHO a bigger problem is equating innovation with digitization. In the end, living standards mostly stem from our interactions with the physical world, not digital. After all, rich people buy yachts and mansions, not Adamantium armor++ set
Venture capital ought to have it's hand on the pulse of technology. The most impactful tech of the last 5 years, with massive societal and financial returns, was mRNA vaccines. Yet I've never heard VCs raving about them. As soon it touches physical world, it gets shunned by investors
In these conditions, it makes sense to pump as much money as possible into an early Amazon, Google or Facebook.
However this seemingly happy story has a few important downsides. First, to a large extent these technologies do not create new markets as much as they disrupt or displace old ones, which is one reason why productivity gains are so meager.
No. They displace old industries by introducing technologies and processes that made them more productive. People use them because they provide a higher quality service at a lower price.
And all three of the examples he provided: Amazon, Google and Facebook, have been enormously innovative, and created entirely new markets. I could write a long essay on the markets that had their emergence faciliated by any one of the three companies listed.
What's worrying is that such an obviously misinformed article could be held in such high esteem by so many on HN.
It is worth considering that the problem is too much debt and that people are missing the forest for the trees. Gambits like Uber still aren't profitable or sustainable, and we have no idea what sort of market it'll be working in once it tries to make money. By the books, it appears that Uber's "investors" have been burned quite badly. Putting in the hard work to build a profitable business is less rewarding by comparison to making a high-growth low-value-add play and trying to get money off people with access to big lines of credit.
And, ranting, it is still quite possible that Amazon/Google/Facebook are going to lose the super profits in the long term. Which to me means 2030+, 2040+ as the market matures. Google is probably a bit more secure in that they have to commit suicide to lose money (which they will eventually, every company gets bad managers sooner or later). AWS on the other hand faces a risk of being chipped at from all angles by specialised providers. They do not have a magical spell that can resist the market moving towards the marginal cost of production. Facebook lives in a world where staying power is the exception not the norm, they came after numerous other competitors that fell apart under the complexity of managing social networks. They are all but guaranteed to fall in time too, they are in a delicate position where it takes one bad CEO/Director of Misinformation or some Chinese upstart that won't sell out and the whole thing could fall apart.
this is what the real web3 is actually going to solve.
out with globally centralized service dispatch and paupers doing the work on unencrypted user data siphons and in with decentralized identity, reputation and commerce systems that sell to small business.
tools so small business can be as good as uber, everywhere.
In India, the drivers at Uber Bikes(paid better than rapido), Rapido(bike ride startup) are paid sooo damn low by these companies that we have to give them 20-30% extra on top of the actual ride price. How low you might ask ? 40 cents to travel 3-4Kms in my city. One Gallon of petrol costs over 6 Dollars in India. They keep showing these ads that the price is low to attract the customers, pay the drivers even less and then The customer and the drivers have to make a deal outside of the platform before the ride is even initiated. I have no idea how will the drivers survive with the extremely low wage. I have switched back to public transport just like the good ol days before the uber era.
For some who might wonder how Uber attracts riders to the platform, it’s done through “bonus” payments. They give riders “goals” to achieve in terms of numbers of orders completed. Achieve these numbers each month and you get a bonus. The bonus is usually comparable to an expected monthly wage. Over time though, the goals go higher (Uber says the demand is more but fails to say the supply is more as well) and then the bonus goes down. Over time it just becomes an abusive relationship. But like a person trapped in a Ponzi scheme, many drivers believe they can do it if they work hard enough (they shoulder the blame) and they stick on.
The loss of innovation has zip to do with the Uber Economy.
Try the fact that the middle class has been gutted by an unfair tax structure that shreds responsibility away from the wealthy and corporations and has created peripheral damage in high college cost and low public school expectations.
Bring back the tax rate where people making over 540k (the 1980 equivalent of the top tax rate $225,000) pay 50% on anything over that amount. In 1980 it was 70%. SEVENTY PERCENT.
If we raise the top tax rate, we pay for infrastructure, college, teachers that can teach critical thinking instead of how to pass a test. The middle class can chill out and raise a family, take a vacation, save for retirement, and not live pay check to pay check. We rebuild the middle class.
What happens if college goes back to a Pell grant and a part-time job cost? INNOVATION. People will have the ability to think freely and be creative. They won't be forced to figure out a career at 18-21 years old.
Guess what else we do? We start paying down the national debt for once and actually reducing the debt ceiling.
Our tax structure is insanely out of balance. That's the number one core problem in the United States.
Excepting star-power labor (professional athletes, entertainers), most of the income in the upper tax brackets goes to the owners of capital. When stocks pay dividends, the dividends are taxed as income. If you raise taxes on upper-tax-bracket income, you just promote stock-based compensation instead: compensation in stock options (which are taxed as capital gains when realized, not income), stock buy-backs instead of issuing dividends (again, capital gains rather than income), etc.
The long-term capital gains tax rate, for those in high tax brackets, is 20%.
Go ahead, set the income tax rate for high tax brackets to seventy percent. It won't actually make a difference.
Then you have to tax stock-based income. Any employee acquiring stocks must report it one time as income and get taxed on it. No capitalism back doors. However we figure it out, the wealthy need to pay more into annual tax revenues.
A functioning society requires a large and happy middle class, affordable liberal arts college, strong K-12 teaching, and time off.
Another option to address the same basic issue is to fix estate taxes, which might be an easier fix. (Among other things, change the cost basis for the estate taxes to be the price when the asset was originally acquired, not the price when it was transferred to the inheritor.) Either way, I agree that it's critical to close the routes to avoiding taxes.
Before the stock yields anything the corporation is taxed. To follow that, allowing unprofitable companies to be publicly traded is corruption. As others have mentioned above, we are also suffering from a lack of financial regulations.
> Try the fact that the middle class has been gutted by an unfair tax structure
> Our tax structure is insanely out of balance. That's the number one core problem in the United States.
This is actually even worse in many places in EU. I completely agree with your diagnosis and would also like to see your solution implemented.
I have an impression, taxation here in Europe is used as a political tool to play middle class and lower class against each other. And whatever the crisis, the middle class is expected to foot the bill. All the while, the powers that be use handouts to lower class to pacify them (prevent a revolution?)
The huge difference is that in USA most of your taxes goes to the federation while in EU most of your taxes goes to your local authorities while EU gets very little of your money. People are more willing to pay taxes when they know it wont be sent thousands of kilometres away.
The current president had been holding a position of power in Washington for 50 years. Same is true for many other top politicians. As long as you vote in the same people over and over again, nothing will change.
we have no choice. Only parties who support capital can muster the resources to run & win because of strategic voting made necessary by a first past the post voting system.
All problems are down stream of voting rights, gerrymandering, and first past the post / non-proportional representation
I don’t think that those are the problems. I think it’s the money from a tiny group of wealthy individuals.
Limit that to no more than $1000 per natural person per year and make it illegal for entities that are not natural persons to contribute any money (PACs, companies, etc).
Contribution to political campaigns should mostly be by time, volunteering to work for a campaign.
I can read and look up historical records. This isn’t rocket science. The combination of gutting our tax rates plus the GOP spending trillions on wars and tax breaks has killed the middle class. Look at everything Reagan did during his first 4 years. He decimated the middle class and waged war on black people and the poor.
I think that is an unfair summarisation since all the Wright brothers did was fly a very non-practical plane for about ten seconds as a kind of "MVP". There was no market. Commercial airliners took that core technology, refined it, and used it to actually create an entire new service and market.
I am writing about Ryan air or Southwest those companies did nothing to on R&D for flights.
No one is accusing them that we don't have a Moon colony because they are doing what they do.
Author is accusing application operating company that there is not enough innovation because of them. So it seems author just took Uber marketing division where they shout about "innovation" seriously.
There are companies that are doing actual R&D and Uber is buying services/goods from them, so it is like Southwest buying Boeing planes is actually paying R&D costs of coming up with better planes.
Also author is making point that somehow there is not enough innovation - well I have different point of view - whole innovation happened and made it possible to operate something like Uber. Smartphones and mobile connectivity with GPS is the innovation that was not as widespread 20 years ago, heck even 10 years ago things were still starting up.
Can we get an open source gig economy app where 75% of the profits go to gig workers? Then 7.5% would go towards employee rights and benefits of gig workers, 7.5% towards contributors improving the software, and 10% towards customer support and legal third parties.
If the purpose of the co-op is to ensure that profits go to the workers and not to company owners/investors, then either you plan to fail at that purpose or you're not interesting to the investors. If the lion's share of the operating profits would go to the investors, it's no better than Uber, if the lion's share of the operating profits would go to the drivers, then what's the motivation to invest?
Based on my limited experience, VCs could be dissuaded from investing in co-ops by:
1. No prospects of a big payout (IPO, acquisition).
2. VCs like to have a single point-of-contact (the CEO) and few other owners. In a start-up, the CEO is answerable and serves only the investors. Co-ops behave more like a member-driven organization whose obligation is first and foremost to its members.
3. No option for majority ownership. A co-op eventually has to be majorly owned by the employees rather than by investors.
Huh? Nothing stops gig workers as it is from organizing and just paying an app developer. The unions simply can't make inroads with them for whatever reasons.
The workers are independent contractors. Uber drivers and TaskRabbit workers and the like are not on employee time or property. So what behaviors are you talking about? Uber certainly doesn't have to sell the Teamsters ad space on their app of they don't want to. It's their app.
There is no real journalism, only perspectives trying to win mindshare. Those that believe, and may be able to prove in productivity gains are being actively shouted down by those better funded saying otherwise. The truth? There is no truth.
I believe this is not true. There are degrees of truthfulness. Some journalist do a better job than other. Such cynicism is the exact effect tyrants like Trump and Putin seek. It means they are free to do as they please.
I gather that it's even worse than that: I've heard that Econ 101 teaches those commonly heard things (supply/demand curves, inflation, etc) so that higher-level courses can then contextualize why they're so wrong and oversimplistic when they teach the "real" current theory (kinda like how we still teach the "electrons orbiting a nucleus" model in HS physics only for undergrad-level physics to say "that's all wrong: their position is described by a probability-density wave-function".
Gotta start somewhere, I guess - but I'm just afraid that because I'm nowhere near an expert that I'll be bamboozled by someone with legitimate qualifications, but without realizing that they're actually still not qualified to speak about the subject either.
From “ Total Factor Productivity Growth in Historical Perspective” referenced in the article:
> Economists have long found that they can explain only a portion of economic growth by the growth of inputs to production, such as the number of hours worked or the amount of capital used. The unexplained (or residual) portion, which presumably reflects advances in production technologies and processes, is conventionally attributed to all of the production factors together and is referred to as total factor productivity (TFP) growth.
I don’t think it’s fair to blame Uber for the lack of economic growth for the entire USA.
In addition, the paper referencing the economic slowdown compares 1970-2006, 36 years, to 2006-2016, 10 years. And during those 10 years the housing bubble collapsed. The dates selected appear cherry picked to show the largest decline possible.
Amazon was not the first in e-commerce and they "didn't pay taxes" because they reinvested the money rather than taking it as dividends. Amazon won because of their efficiency and customer service. Even today, FedEx usually takes weeks to deliver while Amazon has same day or two day delivery.
Disruption these days is mostly about playing by a set of rules you invent for yourself to get an edge on the competition and calling it innovation. It's rare that real innovation is used to disrupt.
Imagine disrupting any industry where some form of accreditation is required by making an app which allows any person to perform those services. Anyone could be a doctor, lawyer, notary, etc. with no license needed. That's not disruption, that's breaking the law until the company is big enough to bribe (lobby) to change the law to allow that. That's literally Über-style "disruption".
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[ 2.4 ms ] story [ 297 ms ] threadWe have put a pen and paper onto every desktop and every pocket but almost no-one can read or write.
Edit: And those that can find that only a tiny fraction of the fold is written down (accessible through the virtual cyber world). Amazon's secret to success was forcing every service to live behind a "public" API.
I think it's more similar to any other profession, with a skillset you can learn if you're interested, or learn to get paid.
Not everyone is interested in writing software, and that's fine.
It has also never been easier to tinker with things, as root VMs are cheaply available, in comparison to 20 years ago, when you really were just given a cpanel interface, if you were on a budget.
How many people do you know that refuse to learn the software they use everyday? How many times have you helped a friend or colleague with some problem just by googling it even when you don't really understand what they do for a living?
It's not that we need everyone to create software, but it would unlock huge productivity gains if everyone stopped pasting screen shots into word. Excel might be the most important knowledge tool of our time, and almost no one knows how to use it.
Programmers have been doing GDD* for a while. Other knowledge workers will catch up or be left behind their peers.
I use Excel weekly, but not daily. The last thing I remember googling in it was last week and it was (for the fiftieth time) “excel format as millions”.
* Google Driven Development
I think sometimes it is also the case of knowingly what to Google for, and being able to pick out the correct answer.
For example, recently I was involved in a cache issue for an android phone. One of the answers on Google was to download some sort of cache cleaning program. Of course, I knew that this was likely to be a security risk, but others would have downloaded it.
People are naturally wary about this thing, so sometimes I don't mind if they'd prefer not to Google and implement a solution themselves.
To me this is a part of literacy: how to know what to search for, and how to know which results are relevant.
Could not disagree more. I run a small business selling used video games online, and come from a SWE/EEE background.
The fact that we've got processes in place that are built from the ground up to be scalable and automatable, as well as the simple Python scripts to perform this automation has basically tripled or quadrupled our productivity.
I could see much the same happening for a lot of workers who handle data, and as more people who have learned to code enter the workforce I'm not sure employers will continue to tolerate (for example) accountants who can't write their own report generators.
what a great way to put it
Similarly, you may never write an OS or a AAA game, but being able to just automate a teeny tiny bit of your Excel spreadsheet, that's where software literacy will benefit the most people.
Adding software got easy because development evolved, and supply exceeded demand. The "Internet of Trash" is my go-to example. Modern engineering got so good, and we're surrounded by so much efficient, durable technology that manufacturers ran out of ways to add value. So they started figuring out how to:
1) add internet connectivity whether it's wanted or not
2) control and break things using software
3) extract profitable data from users
All of these just kick the can down the road toward more solutionism without really innovating in the original engineering domain.
This a pure education issue, and that includes eradication of the false education taught by religious backed educational institutes. The magical thinking taught by religious backed schools and universities create mentally constrained individuals who live in a demon haunted world and are dragging down all of civilization.
- budgeting
- to do / productivity
- book / music / video game / etc. media cataloging
- project planning
- event planning
- file storage
- etc
When someone remarked once that most SaaS products are a front end to a spreadsheet, I just thought, “they’re not wrong.”
Now if people had computer literacy they wouldn’t pay $20 a month for a service their computer already does.
Almost all SaaS are about easy cross-device, cross-internet, sharing, which all traditional apps don’t even try to be good at.
* https://syncthing.net/
How do you fix it when the incentives are skewed towards quick bucks? Government pushing certain industries has worked for China. There'll be a lot of opposition to that in the US I'd imagine.
https://www.crunchbase.com/
It is an innovation and banking problem. There are all kinds of feedback loops involved.
The ridiculous amount of liquidity in the global system changes and distorts risk preferences.
It also creates these giant sinks of brain power that are just moving money around. We have had amazing innovation the past twenty years in electronic markets, hedge funds, venture capital firms, cryptocurrency. Think of how much brain power is being wasted just modeling capital structures instead of something actually innovating because there is so much capital moving around that needs to be modeled.
How much brain power is being wasted at hedge funds? I have read hedge fund manager Jim Simons say he thinks he has the best research department in the world inside his hedge fund. It is not that much different than dedicating the best research department in the world to playing better poker. It is an utter waste of resources and we see it all around us with the complete lack of innovation.
I'm in London and I'm not talking about black cabs for ref.
And don't even get me started on Uber Eats which universally delivers cold, damaged food which is twice the price of going in the store and their customer support is so bad that it's nearly impossible to get a refund from them now even though it was 2 hours late and looked like it'd been delivered in a washing machine on a spin cycle.
Ultimately this is an era largely of the conglomerate, it doesn’t matter who you are unless you’re one of the big fishes. Media, Advertising, etc. Its no longer small shops that are creating interesting and useful things, at least not at the rate they were. It’s more likely to be an expansion out of a big company into a marketplace trying to sip an audience than it is a disruptor changing any of the game. The disrupters that exist must get and stay large as fast as possible as well.
I’m looking for things that don’t scale. I think we’ve basically poured all societies money into anything that might scale. We’ve found we have run out of those things. And all the problems we have left are things like education, homelessness, lack of meaning, healthcare, etc. All problems so entrenched I’m willing to say at this point they can’t scale, and therefore won’t be solved. Maybe the next technological revolution will be a social dynamic. Who knows.
Yes, Ubers are more expensive than taxis in some cases, but in many other cases, they can do things that taxis can't.
Like what?
https://help.uber.com/riders/article/vouchers-for-events-faq...
It was $30 for the slowest uber or lyft before tip. Taxi fare is $2.60 + $1.70/km, so it would have been around $10 to make the 3.5 mile journey. There used to be enough taxi's in the area to just hail one.
Hoorah to that!
We need a "cultural revolution" that let's us catch up with our technological advances. New forms of digital literacy will change the idea that any technological advance is good for its own sake to seriously asking "what for?" of any technology.
Mere "efficiency" and "inevitability" will be seen as dumb reason and forms of technological ignorance.
Intelligence amplification (IA) will usurp "artificial intelligence" (AI), putting human agency ahead of laziness and "convenience".
For now I think we have to go through this runaway period of technology, to get it out of our system. Let's hope it doesn't kill us.
You forget just how terrible the taxi industry was prior to Uber. I would walk for miles rather than take a taxi. I would gladly pay 2-3x more for an Uber than taking a taxi. There are signs that traditional taxi companies are waking up to their enormous service issues, but it only took their imminent demise.
But like, the taxi meters are just so damn cheap compared to what ubers are nowadays, and thats with $6billion in losses per year. $30 is too much to go just 5 miles in 15 minutes.
* "My card machine is out of order, only cash."
* "That will be $[some outrageous and clearly fake meter amount].
* "My meter is broken. I'll just estimate it."
* "There is a $10 surcharge for luggage" / "there is a $5 surcharge for that neighborhood" / there is a $10 surcharge for cards." Bonus points when they only tell you after you arrive.
* Driving me the long way. This happened ~25% of all of my trips. It was particularly egregious before mobile phone GPS became ubiquitous.
* Unsafe driving.
* Stinking / dirty taxis
* The cars took hours to arrive, and often never arrived at all. This is probably my biggest gripe. If there is one thing I require, it's efficient transport from A to B. If they can't even do this, they shouldn't be in business.
I can count on one hand the number of times I've had any of these issues with Uber. I do agree that the price gap between taxis and Uber is increasing, but I gladly pay it. As above, I would gladly pay 3x more for Uber, so until the price difference arrives there, I'm sticking with Uber.
It seems like so many of the apps that come to dominate just make up for shortcomings unique to the US that then, with money, take over the rest of the west for no good reason other than scale to get 25 people at the top of those companies rich.
I’ve never seen the need for Uber. Taxis have never been an issue in the UK and the most successful firms in the city I lived when Uber was starting out already had apps. Literally the only thing Uber had going for it was masses of money to undercut the market and advertise to younger millennials - basically their excess money allowed them to get better distribution and cheat the market.
I’ve used Uber three or four times in my life and each time was a worse experience than a taxi.
US payment systems lag the rest of the world massively - particularly the UK
Still way more friction than Uber where you setup a payment method in the app once and no actual payment is ever required to the driver, pretty much anywhere in the world.
Also:
As a matter of fact, an Uber ride requires zero interaction with the driver other than agreeing that you're the customer and he's the provider.Quasi-frictionless and immediate, which - in my book - makes it a winner in spite of them having a despicable corporate culture.
The price considerations are a different conversation, but AFAIC, I'm certainly ready to pay more for an Uber to get to that frictionless transaction.
The day a cab ride is as easy to setup as an Uber ride, I'll very gladly stop using Uber.
But in most places, that simply isn't the case.
Uber introduced competition which has massively improved all other taxi services. These days there's nothing special about Uber except its ubiquity so I don't care if it fails now. Ofc this doesn't excuse their illegal practices.
Last time I tried to get an Uber in central London in the early hours of the morning two or three drivers cancelled before one eventually showed up after I'd phoned Uber support to complain. I'm not sure the phone call is what did the trick - in fact I'm pretty sure it wasn't - but what triggered that call is I'd been trying to get a ride for 20 - 30 minutes by that point. It sounds like this kind of poor QoS might be a new problem though: I certainly wasn't aware of it before the pandemic.
I live in SW1 and end up in these situations on a weekly basis, I’ve never waited 30 minutes for a Uber.
Utterly false. They produced people taking way more rides. More rides = more people going out to different places.
E.g - a reduction in the price of wheat will increase food consumption even after accounting for people switching from other crops. Conversely, an increase in the price of Lego will reduce the amount of toys the average child gets, even after adjusting for the substitution to action figure etc.
I think the logic is to own the portal to taxis and become a gatekeeper, by being the only app that the user has installed for hailing taxis. So the barrier to entry becomes large because you have to convince people to install your app.
There's still a speed-bump, but it isn't as jarring.
I just checked with my friends too and not one person remembers using an app to call a cab before uber. It is possible that some company possibly offered it but it certainly wasn't a popular option before Uber and it was just awful using the taxis here.
I agree that Uber injected some fresh energy in a somewhat complacent market, but the real "innovation" with Uber is with its business model ("employees but not employees") and willingness to just ignore local laws. This I think is the real point of the article; for all the pompous bloviating about being "disruption" and "changing the world", the actual real change is actually not all that large, with many of the changes being of doubtful or even negative worth.
It's more than just a substitution of tapping an icon vs dialing a phone number.
The Uber business model of non-medallion cars and geographic matching algorithm builds up a "distributed mesh" of drivers to serve passengers -- especially those who are not at typical taxi "hubs" like airports, convention centers, downtown hotels, etc.
Before Uber, getting from one suburb to another suburb using a taxi was unreliable. A traditional taxi dispatcher can broadcast a ride request from a potential passenger in the suburbs but drivers can ignore it and wait for the more lucrative airport-to-downtown ride for $50. Why? Because the taxi meter only runs when that passenger is in the car so it punishes suburb-to-suburb trips and instead, incentives them to wait for the longer airport trips. So hub-to-suburb and suburb-back-to-hub is "dead time" the drivers are not paid for.
A traditional taxi company -- even with an app -- doesn't build that geographically distributed mesh to the same degree. The economic constraint was the taxi meter.
When I was stuck in some distant suburb and had to use taxi companies, the way I "hacked" them to reliably come was to tell dispatch to tell the taxi driver I will tip an extra $20 for the ride. Basically, a form of bribery so the taxi drivers wouldn't ignore the dispatch call.
I find this interesting because on the food delivery side, this is kind of mental gymnastics the worker needs to do. If it is a busy evening hour, do you want to take a (small) McDonalds order? Most likely not, unless there is a nice tip. You could do at least two deliveries in the time you wait for the McD order.
I imagine rider side is the same way as delivery. Every worker has to do this sanity check if whether something is worth doing.
If workers are taking low reward rides or deliveries, it is probably because they think they aren't missing out on something better.
Isn’t it the same for Uber? They don’t get paid to get to your location so the only advantage as a driver is being picking up someone in the area you drop off another passenger. Dispatch worked similarly but it had its limitations of its time.
One thing that was not possible that Uber does is ride sharing.
That's why the GP talks about a "distributed mesh" of drivers. There's simply more Uber drivers than there have ever been taxis in most places. So in the age of Uber if you're in a suburban area there's a high likelihood there's an Uber driver near you. So there's a small amount of unpaid driving time for the driver. There's also a decent chance of them finding a return passenger at the destination thanks to a similar increase in the number of potential riders vs taxis.
Most taxi companies in the suburbs would be a flat rate that the dispatcher would tell you before you got picked up (or the driver would ask the dispatcher curbside), they often didn't use the meter.
In some ways it does though. Some industries corner the market through regulation. Ie it's impossible for a new competitor to start up that follows all the rules and it's that way by design. The only way to break into that market is to break the rules or buy out an existing business.
Living briefly in London taught me that you cannot reasonably expect a hailed taxi to take you from A to B no matter how hard it is raining or how obviously pregnant the person you’re with is, if the taxi driver doesn’t fancy going to B, even if B is still within 20m of A.
Living for far longer in Edinburgh taught me that the credit card machine is manufactured by the same company that sells McFlurry boxes to MickeyD’s. This was still true when I visited Edinburgh again 3 months ago.
Uber seems to me to be abusive to their drivers. And occasionally to their passengers. But there’s a good reason they were so successful early on. They made my life, as a customer, better, easier, simpler, less encumbered with bullshit.
The old way was awful and Uber got a hell of a first mover advantage.
FWIW, I actually agree that the "Gig Economy" is riddled with problems, but at least in the case of Taxi's where Uber started, the existing system was rotten and in need of replacement.
many drivers were first generation immigrants.. owned homes in queens, were putting kids through college, looking at their name come up on the medallion wait-list in a few years as a retirement.
all that stopped with appcars.
but i suppose if the only constituents you really care about are customers, the people getting rich writing dispatch/billing software and the people facilitating the construction of a massive venture capital fueled duopolistic takeover of an entire industry, this works too i guess.
most drivers i spoke to seemed to like the medallions as they offered some long term investment potential and a sort of seniority reward. there was of course big capital at play, but drivers could have complained to the tlc... what can they do now? file a support ticket?
Meanwhile, many of those immigrants were working off of someone else's medallion for peanuts, so the medallion owner could book Nicki Minaj for his kid's bar mitzvah.
i think total rent for a car was something like $260/day and $280/day with medallion. (i think this also includes insurance)
remains to be seen whether this is better than encouraging drivers to go out and buy a late model car on personal credit.
regarding the boroughs, you had to know how to live in the city. any bodega, bar or restaurant would have the number for the nearest black car dispatch and would often call for you... pickup was usually within 5 minutes.
anecdotally: yellow cab drivers often seemed like financially stable professionals who were often raising families and in a good financial position. uber drivers always felt like temps. black car bases throughout the boroughs were often small and family owned. again this is anecdotal, but i like talking to people.
That's exactly what happens now
https://www.wired.co.uk/article/uber-upfront-destinations
> Not to mention that with Uber you know exactly when the driver is coming
Not any more, they cancel
The fact that I can often use Uber abroad is a massive bonus. It's almost a guarantee that you're going to be ripped off when using taxis in a foreign country.
If something was critical I would never use an Uber - I’d rather walk, or cycle if a traditional taxi wasn’t possible for some reason.
I don't doubt that you have had bad experiences with Uber, and also that other people have. But you would find it very hard to convince me that people have better experiences with non Uber taxis on average.
Looking at the app store reviews in the UK of Uber, sorted by most recent
1* - Lost my trust
1* - Has gone downhill
1* - Uber Scammed me
1* - Can't get an Uber anymore
1* - The worst experience I have ever had
2* - Uber is deteriorating
2* - waiting times have increased
3* - Cancelled rides
1* Deteriorated over lockdown
etc.
All referring to the same problems I see, rides accepted by drivers, then cancelled a minute or so later.
Going further back, full of 1/2 reviews:
A sad Decline, Slow at finding drivers, Getting worse by the day, Scheduled trips are canceleld, Getting worse & worse, Most unreliable, etc
Maybe the occasional 3* but going back 6 months, "Uber is dead, No Longer the no 1 ride in London, Drivers keep cancelling, Cannot get a booking, Never any drivers, Never turned up, 1 star is too much, used to be great", etc. etc, those were back to October.
I'm not sure how long it's been going on (the same complaints go back at least a year on the reviews), but Uber don't seem to exist any more, otherwise they'd be concerned and change something to fix it.
I'm not surprised to see no good reviews. I can't imagine people going out of their way to leave good reviews for Uber at this point. Their overall rating is 4.5/5 though
The overall rating is based on the last decade of reviews
The article cites a study on (USA) GDP as a metric measuring of productivity, however, GDP is a poor proxy measure of "things being produced". USA GDP includes financial services and consumer spending, so using debt to pay for things vs. producing more, can still boost GDP.
In the United States, pre-Uber around 2010, it was very hard to find cabs in certain cities and even neighborhoods in those cities. New York City had no problems, but as I had lived in Chicago and San Francisco with lower population densities compared to top tier cities in the world -- the only way to get cabs even a few miles outside the main downtown area, was to call taxi dispatch, if you knew their number -- it was even hard to look it up online -- and schedule a pick up, which usually took 30min+. The US taxi system was stalled at the time, and Uber forced it to start adapting to the smart phone era. The tragedy is that the people investing in and also running uber had their own pyramid scheme instead of pricing out the business correctly. They also didn't consider the social/gov implications -- places with good taxi systems didn't need them, as you alluded to with the UK, but they shoved into it anyways.
So Uber was an innovation, one that is trying to find its financial balance still. I'd never care to schedule another taxi pick-up for next morning, 16hrs in advance when I want to go to the airport.
But the article saying that uber innovation and having others try it on other industries is stymying productivity isn't completely correct either.
And as far as I know you still can’t book an Uber for the next day or whatever.
At least here in Berlin, when I book via Uber, I'm told more often than not that it won't be an Uber picking me up but a normal taxi.
It seems like the benefit of Uber was that it provided better service for many who didn't have the superior taxis in Newcastle.
If all the other replies (including some UK ones) in this thread contradicting your personal experience don't convince you, would that be a form of solipsism? (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solipsism)
Now instead of having this patchwork, we have one giant monolithic taxi provider (Uber) that threatens both the good and bad taxi services of old. And because Uber is more than happy to subsidize rides thanks to VC funding having an equal/superior experience is often not enough to compete.
A very bold claim. I am not sure about the finances of Uber and how it impacts shareholders vs employees and how many people are getting rich off it, but let me tell you that services like Uber have been a God send as a consumer. The haggling with old school taxi drivers is one of the worst experiences one can have, not to mention that you have no idea what the prices should be if you are not local.
Uber and similar apps remove all that nonsense. You can disagree with their business practices or even how much they charge, but I hope apps and services like Uber do not die, EVER. I don't want to go back to being harassed by taxi drivers.
Take, for example, Hailo: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hailo.
They were available in London before Uber, and they had an entirely different model where they just franchised the technology for people in each city to use.
They were profitable, and were driven out of existence by Ubers blitz scaling, which still hasn't produced a profit :(
Every time I call an Uber in London, an extremely professional and courteous driver shows up within a couple of minutes in a Mercedes S-class or equivalent, at a price only slightly above that of a black cab.
I doubt that you can find a better taxi service anywhere.
If we want a functioning market, let a bunch of little guys show what they can do, don't let one huge guy scare everyone else away.
Tried it again that evening and it failed -- multiple times the ride would be accepted, then cancelled. Ended up walking.
Looking at recent reviews for the Uber app it seems this is common, Uber has gone from being somewhere reliable I can get a cab, from Sydney to San Francisco to Singapore, to being something that can't be relied upon
It's incredible spending time in the undeveloped/developing world - all the problems and solutions that "gig" apps supposedly are good for live on to this day all over the world.
Need a place to stay? Ask around the village and someone will be more than happy for you to sleep in the spare room for $1/night.
Need a ride? Wait where the locals are, you'll get in a communal "taxi" with locals for 10 or 20 cents to the next town.
In the Western World there are apps for this kind of thing that funnel profits to mega corporations. In the rest of the world there are average people on the street doing it every day as part of normal life.
Out of curiosity - where did you have such experience?
Real people out there are much friendlier and welcoming than seems possible.
I landed in India or Brazil a few times, with language familiarity limited to "bon día". Without local sim card. This trip would be orders of magnitude harder without Uber and similar.
To him the reason platforms exist as they do right now is because they constitute a fundamental shift away from market capitalism to what he calls techo-feudalism.
Instead of thinking of companies like Uber as selling software and paying wage labour to generate profit, it makes much more sense to think of it as a fiefdom that extract rents directly from its users outside of markets, maintains unpaid or barely paid labour, essentially a techno-peasant class, and is funded by barons in the form of VC capital directly and the state indirectly.
Through that lens for the first time to me it made perfect sense why it isn't so absurd to have gigantic companies that barely make any profits, have no differentiated products or much of a workforce. The point of these new businesses isn't to dominate markets and sell things at great margins, it's to claim territory, extract value and then use that control to directly command users on your behalf.
https://metacpc.org/en/crypto-blockchain/
The major characteristic of feudalism was that power centers deteriorated and power was distributed to local lords insted of central kings. So how is having a single gigantic company more like feudalism?
Lastly, why come up with such convoluted theory when "too much speculation due to cheap debt" explains everything with much less gymnastics
because those are not the same thing. Feudalists don't extract surplus wage labor, they extract direct tribute from their subjects, and just like that the entire value of Facebook say, is in what its users produce on its platform. That experience is the actual rent they collect. Ever wondered why all of this stuff is free?
And power is deteriorating. Away from the state, which played a central role in organizing and managing the traditional market economy towards these private spheres of influence of which the principal unit is the tech-firm.
This stuff is free because Facebook is an advertisement company. I enjoy a good conspiracy as well but at least it must be somewhat entertaining.
Just as it was possible for a medieval king to have terrible finances by spending more on war/security than he collected in rent from Barons, a tech company can lose lots of money by spending more on customer acquisition/platform maintenance than collected in rent from suppliers.
You could argue similar structures exist outside of tech in Walmart’s supplier relationships or Standard Oil’s railroad arrangements.
Also, the methods used by these companies to “claim territory” often does seem to create innovation. The gmail web app, WhatsApp etc create a lot of customer value despite being used for territory expansion rather the collection of direct revenue.
Extremely well executed startups does, which of course requires a team in just the right milieu and timing.
(I assume you meant "feature-phone" there?)
You should tell your SA friends to reach out to some tech journos, they'd love to write a "Uber before Uber" story, and I'd like to know the reasons why their project didn't pan-out myself. SMS-based applications had a lot of potential in the mid-2000s, often the failures were elsewhere, and doesn't SA also have SMS-based billing too? that could have been an amazingly successful service...
The 2007 to 2012 period was a perfect storm of bringing together connectivity with never before utility from newly developed devices, and if you were in the right place at the right time to stake a claim, then you had significant first mover advantages.
It was discovering new land that had not been settled yet, similar to when computing and society advanced to allow for computers in every home, and then internet connectivity, and then finally, 24/7 computing plus internet computing in your pocket.
Of course, having deep, deep pockets to hire the people at the forefronts of this land rush is also a huge advantage.
I just realized that GPS was probably the reason: I remember my first time using Uber and it was the fact you could see the location of the car and yourself on the map in real-time, and so you could easily get to the car without the usual hassle of trying to locate and identify each other. That's just not possible with SMS (even if a phone did support GPS, I've never seen anything like "send coordinates by SMS" on a feature-phone, and even if the server could render a map it wouldn't be downloaded in real-time to be useful.
...though if it was a Java mobile app for each platform, that might have worked (even over GPRS), but considering how expensive mobile-data was at the time, hmm, yeah.
Yeah, if I had to guess, it was so extremely hard for them to recruit taxi drivers in South Africa. The metered taxi industry has always been extremely untrusted (my personal opinion), and basically non-existent.
They approached these guys and also the hand full of companies that existed back then, but it really wasn't until Uber established a trusted driver experience that we really started using taxis on a daily / weekly basis. So they simply did not have the funding / momentum to establish such a large scale transition in transportation and consumer trust within SA.
For years prior to Uber, the segment for "upper / middle class" public transport was not served and for sure not accessible. You could phone a cab company in Cape Town and get a taxi, but then it was super expensive and that was basically the only option – service which was also not available in most other cities.
When Uber arrived, they (and other companies) helped jobless drivers secure funding for cabs and within a year or two there were thousands of drivers, cabs and Ubers in all metros.
For the first time, when I had to go to the airport, I could get a Uber instead of asking a friend to drop me off. Crazy but this was the reality.
They create research that is used by politicians to justify them creating a policy they'd already decided to create for political reasons. They manufacture consent.
What did Chuck Colson want to do to the Brookings institution again?
The first sentence of the wikipedia page for 'thinktank'.
Venture capital ought to have it's hand on the pulse of technology. The most impactful tech of the last 5 years, with massive societal and financial returns, was mRNA vaccines. Yet I've never heard VCs raving about them. As soon it touches physical world, it gets shunned by investors
However this seemingly happy story has a few important downsides. First, to a large extent these technologies do not create new markets as much as they disrupt or displace old ones, which is one reason why productivity gains are so meager.
No. They displace old industries by introducing technologies and processes that made them more productive. People use them because they provide a higher quality service at a lower price.
And all three of the examples he provided: Amazon, Google and Facebook, have been enormously innovative, and created entirely new markets. I could write a long essay on the markets that had their emergence faciliated by any one of the three companies listed.
What's worrying is that such an obviously misinformed article could be held in such high esteem by so many on HN.
And, ranting, it is still quite possible that Amazon/Google/Facebook are going to lose the super profits in the long term. Which to me means 2030+, 2040+ as the market matures. Google is probably a bit more secure in that they have to commit suicide to lose money (which they will eventually, every company gets bad managers sooner or later). AWS on the other hand faces a risk of being chipped at from all angles by specialised providers. They do not have a magical spell that can resist the market moving towards the marginal cost of production. Facebook lives in a world where staying power is the exception not the norm, they came after numerous other competitors that fell apart under the complexity of managing social networks. They are all but guaranteed to fall in time too, they are in a delicate position where it takes one bad CEO/Director of Misinformation or some Chinese upstart that won't sell out and the whole thing could fall apart.
out with globally centralized service dispatch and paupers doing the work on unencrypted user data siphons and in with decentralized identity, reputation and commerce systems that sell to small business.
tools so small business can be as good as uber, everywhere.
Try the fact that the middle class has been gutted by an unfair tax structure that shreds responsibility away from the wealthy and corporations and has created peripheral damage in high college cost and low public school expectations.
Bring back the tax rate where people making over 540k (the 1980 equivalent of the top tax rate $225,000) pay 50% on anything over that amount. In 1980 it was 70%. SEVENTY PERCENT.
If we raise the top tax rate, we pay for infrastructure, college, teachers that can teach critical thinking instead of how to pass a test. The middle class can chill out and raise a family, take a vacation, save for retirement, and not live pay check to pay check. We rebuild the middle class.
What happens if college goes back to a Pell grant and a part-time job cost? INNOVATION. People will have the ability to think freely and be creative. They won't be forced to figure out a career at 18-21 years old.
Guess what else we do? We start paying down the national debt for once and actually reducing the debt ceiling.
Our tax structure is insanely out of balance. That's the number one core problem in the United States.
The long-term capital gains tax rate, for those in high tax brackets, is 20%.
Go ahead, set the income tax rate for high tax brackets to seventy percent. It won't actually make a difference.
A functioning society requires a large and happy middle class, affordable liberal arts college, strong K-12 teaching, and time off.
> Our tax structure is insanely out of balance. That's the number one core problem in the United States.
This is actually even worse in many places in EU. I completely agree with your diagnosis and would also like to see your solution implemented.
I have an impression, taxation here in Europe is used as a political tool to play middle class and lower class against each other. And whatever the crisis, the middle class is expected to foot the bill. All the while, the powers that be use handouts to lower class to pacify them (prevent a revolution?)
All problems are down stream of voting rights, gerrymandering, and first past the post / non-proportional representation
Limit that to no more than $1000 per natural person per year and make it illegal for entities that are not natural persons to contribute any money (PACs, companies, etc).
Contribution to political campaigns should mostly be by time, volunteering to work for a campaign.
How do you know that? What are your qualifications?
Commercial airlines are building on top what Wright brothers did and just grab easy money instead of figuring out how to fly people to the Moon.
No one is accusing them that we don't have a Moon colony because they are doing what they do.
Author is accusing application operating company that there is not enough innovation because of them. So it seems author just took Uber marketing division where they shout about "innovation" seriously.
There are companies that are doing actual R&D and Uber is buying services/goods from them, so it is like Southwest buying Boeing planes is actually paying R&D costs of coming up with better planes.
Also author is making point that somehow there is not enough innovation - well I have different point of view - whole innovation happened and made it possible to operate something like Uber. Smartphones and mobile connectivity with GPS is the innovation that was not as widespread 20 years ago, heck even 10 years ago things were still starting up.
I mean so did VCs, the tech press, new CS graduates, and Silicon Valley in general.
Sure, start writing it now. The journey of a thousand miles begins with one step.
Uber is losing money so I don't know think drivers want a slice of the profits.
Is it just cultural inertia, i.e. nobody has tried yet?
1. No prospects of a big payout (IPO, acquisition).
2. VCs like to have a single point-of-contact (the CEO) and few other owners. In a start-up, the CEO is answerable and serves only the investors. Co-ops behave more like a member-driven organization whose obligation is first and foremost to its members.
3. No option for majority ownership. A co-op eventually has to be majorly owned by the employees rather than by investors.
If you are in New York City you can use drivers.coop.
> Anybody who’s ever taken an Economics 101 course knows
clearly has no idea what they're talking about. Real market are far more complex than what can be described by Economics 101
Gotta start somewhere, I guess - but I'm just afraid that because I'm nowhere near an expert that I'll be bamboozled by someone with legitimate qualifications, but without realizing that they're actually still not qualified to speak about the subject either.
1920 - 1970: Technology = Solution for a Problem At Hand
1970 - present: Technology = Solution looking for a Problem to Solve
> Economists have long found that they can explain only a portion of economic growth by the growth of inputs to production, such as the number of hours worked or the amount of capital used. The unexplained (or residual) portion, which presumably reflects advances in production technologies and processes, is conventionally attributed to all of the production factors together and is referred to as total factor productivity (TFP) growth.
I don’t think it’s fair to blame Uber for the lack of economic growth for the entire USA.
In addition, the paper referencing the economic slowdown compares 1970-2006, 36 years, to 2006-2016, 10 years. And during those 10 years the housing bubble collapsed. The dates selected appear cherry picked to show the largest decline possible.
The race to the bottom I'm seeing in e-commerce is just hilarious. Great for consumers. Not so great if you are a delivery driver.
Imagine disrupting any industry where some form of accreditation is required by making an app which allows any person to perform those services. Anyone could be a doctor, lawyer, notary, etc. with no license needed. That's not disruption, that's breaking the law until the company is big enough to bribe (lobby) to change the law to allow that. That's literally Über-style "disruption".