“There’s nothing wrong with capitalism. This is a problem of crony-capitalism / corporatism. <EOF>”
That is what people will reflexively say to any analysis that discusses the role of the profit motive and wall street earnings in leading to these outcomes.
The fact that systematic actions like this to amass advantages at expense of the public happen with regularity at Facebook, Google, Apple, Microsoft, Exxon Mobil, General Motors and many other for-profit enterprises, means there may be some room to improve the economic paradigm in which these things are built. And in fact, we have just such a paradigm, and the products of it (Wikipedia, Linux, etc.) are of a completely different character. They don’t have an investor class at all, that needs to recoup their investment by extracting rents forever.
The alternative to for-profit venture funded companies owned by Wall St doesn’t have to be communism or socialism. It can be a gift economy such Science, Creative Commons, or Open Source Software and decentralized permissionless networks based around protocols like HTTP.
For example, Uber can be replaced with an open source, decentralized marketplace that doesn’t take 50% of all drivers’ revenue, but has a free market and ratings / reviews operated by the community.
But if a project is funded by venture CAPITALISTS, subsidized by money-losing unit economics through multiple rounds, and then dumped on the public in a Wall St IPO, and subsequently owned by pension funds and other pools of capital, then yes that is a quintessential example of Capitalism. And the result is that there is an investor class that will always tell Uber’s board to maintain centralized control and extract rents from the public, squeeze drivers, as well as try to hack the society around them (as in this article: secretly trick, get around the police, lobby state officials) whereas an open source decentralized system wouldn’t do any of that.
The dream of cryptocurrency was that the developers would sell the tokens to the public and make money on the primary sale, but after that, the network would belong to the public. Even any royalties that could accrue (such as on every transfer of the token) would be above-board and disclosed once, so everyone knows the deal. Sadly, rather than focusing on a “peer to peer cash system” as Satoshi’s whitepaper said, the entire space switched around 2013 to “store of value”, HODL and speculative investment. It’s actually a cop-out that happened because blockchains can’t scale well.
Bitcoin was the granddaddy and it solved the double-spend problem, but in a very brute-force way, by gathering all transactions in the world in one place every 10 mins to search for a double-spend. It’s actually even worse than that, because every transaction has to be gossipped to every miner, and all mined transactions have to be stored forever in an ever-growing history. The tech is a straightjacket but the vision is good. We do need smart contracts to replace privately-owned middlemen, but we need the smart contracts to run on a better DLT than Blockchain. There have been tons of innovation since 2008 but Bitcoin maximalists and Web2 maximalists both deride all of it, so progress depends on open-minded people who look past the grift of utility-less coins long enough to build something useful
A better argument: People will always try to dupe, deceive, get rich and get their way. Capitalism is - so far - the best way to channel at least some of that energy into building something productive for society as a whole.
For example, Uber can be replaced with an open source, decentralized marketplace that doesn’t take 50% of all drivers’ revenue, but has a free market and ratings / reviews operated by the community.
The current plague of cryptocurrency proves that, by itself, the mere fact of the market being open source and decentralized doesn't do anything useful; it even makes it worse in a lot of ways. The scammers will do exactly the same thing, except they take a 100% cut of your money when they dump the tokens onto retail investors and then do a rug pull.
Smart contracts are a horrible invention that don't do anything new. The equivalent in a normal SQL database (the original DLT) is just running a transaction; every SQL database under the sun has supported this for ages.
No, smart contracts are the realization of something just as revolutionary as Web1 and Web2 and just as likely to change the world, once people use them to help communities organize and coordinate their activities:
Smart contracts represent the first time in history when you can trust code to do what it says. The next best thing that even come close is Intel’s SGX extensions, where we trust Intel, or AWS key management service, where we trust Amazon.
The idea that everyone can custody their own private keys as they want AND no one can be “above the law” and circumvent the business logic, is really powerful. That assurance and level of trust in the code is what enables a whole slew of new applications that currently require human gatekeeper institutions, same as Web1 replaced radio, TV, newspapers, magazines, and centralized platforms like America Online, Compuserve and Minitel.
You just are myopically focused on the silly Web3 phase, same as people derided Web1 personal home pages with <blink> and <marquee> tags until the Web grew up.
>Smart contracts represent the first time in history when you can trust code to do what it says.
This is extremely, extremely wrong. The operators of the network can change the smart contract VM whenever they want. There's nothing magic about it, the VM is just implemented in some code that all of the executor nodes happen to agree on at any given moment in time. In practice they don't change it, but neither would you if you were running a financial database on top of SQL.
And besides, the worst issue in software development is unintended bugs made by programmers. No programmer I know would ever trust any non-trivial code to simply "do what it says" because there could be complex bugs lurking in there somewhere. Smart contracts can't do anything about that, practically speaking they make it much worse by making it difficult/expensive to change the smart contract. There is nothing revolutionary or powerful about them, the point of them is actually to make them weak and expensive on purpose so the executors can charge increasing gas fees.
Edit: I looked at that list of applications, almost all of them could be done better without smart contracts or even without computers. Those things are all thousands of years old. The only exception on that list is NFTs, but NFTs are an entirely bogus concept that are yet another version of a ponzi scheme.
You seem intellectually curious and honest from what you write. So I think you’re one step away from the epiphany, if you can resist doubling down on this statement
this is extremely, extremely wrong
Sure, they can “hardfork” the protocol in a backwards-incompatible way, but they’d have to get the fork adopted by everyone who is currently running (and “securing”) the other version of the database and its “stored procedures”. Often, the node operators don’t all know each other and it’s hard for them to all collude to run the hardfork. Often, the old network has large enough incentives for each individual to not switch, similar to how everyone always threatens to leave Facebook but it still has the same MAU because its network effect is so huge. Good luck leaving when all your friends are on it, etc. And Facebook doesn’t give you a steady stream of income, even. If it did, if you made more profit than it cost you to run a node, why wouldn’t you ALSO keep supporting the old network? I can think of one reason only — if the new network hardfork would pay you MORE and it would be a zero-sum game. It would have to break old contracts AND gain enough traction to pay all the node operators MORE than the old one. That’s quite a hurdle and becomes harder the bigger the original network was.
Bitcoin was forked multiple times, but even a sensible hardfork change like increasing the block size proved too hard to do. Bitcoin Cash and Bitcoin SV are around but most Bitcoin ”miner” nodes still run the tried and true old blue.
Ethereum team had to put a “difficulty bomb” in there to try to get the miners to upgrade. See Ethereum Classic, for instance, it is still being run, despite having no widely adopted applications or stablecoins on it. So even without utility, you can have shitcoins running for years, and you’re talking to me about how ALL nodes can just abandon it?
Now about the bugs and correctness. Look… first of all, no one is claiming that smart contracts will solve every single problem, neither did Web1 but it solved enough that everyone left AOL and CompuServe and MSN and joined it. That’s a FACT. They also left Encarta and Britannica which were quite popular capitalist enterprises, paying all editors top-down from their profits, and instead Wikipedia eclipsed them all. They are now a rounding error.
But you bring a fair point — since smart contracts must be immutable to be trusted (like UniSwap Factory, or many other protocols) they have to be audited and battle tested before the public can trust them with large amounts of value (elections, money, etc.)
The ultimate in this is Provable Correctness, and there are now tools to actually prove a smart contract or a program is correct.
The second place is what Cardano is doing — running fuzzing with massive amounts of input through what is essentially a functional programming language (Haskell). What is not enough about that? You get the best of all worlds… trillions of tests, and then immutable code you can trust.
Disclaimer: I am not building on Cardano and have no connection to their ecosystem. Just that they are focused on moving the space to a more provably correct set of smart contracts, and it addresses your concern.
>So I think you’re one step away from the epiphany, if you can resist doubling down on this statement
I will double and triple down on it. I've been following this for at least a decade now. Smart contracts are completely useless and they need to go. The "epiphany" here is that it was obvious since The DAO transaction was reverted that there is nothing actually immutable about blockchains or smart contracts. If enough whales are threatened by some activity then they'll hard fork, because the miners/stakers all depend on the activity of the whales to realize their profits. The network doesn't exist without them, and it's not actually hard for them to collude.
This is another reason why it's futile for you to expect anything out of blockchains; they're not actually run by volunteers, by design they're run by the greediest possible participants who are supposed to do whatever they possibly can to maximize their profit from mining, because if they don't do this then the network collapses. This is entirely how the system is designed to work. You're not actually "trusting the code", you're trusting that a hardfork won't be successful for entirely non-technical reasons, i.e. that they would lose money. People who run ordinary databases also don't mess with the database for the same reason. Blockchains don't add anything new to this, they're not a good or even interesting invention.
>Bitcoin was forked multiple times, but even a sensible hardfork change like increasing the block size proved too hard to do
This is ahistorical, it wasn't hard to increase the block size, it was just undesired by the majority of the miners. BCH happened because some miners were upset about SegWit, a change that did actually succeed.
>The ultimate in this is Provable Correctness, and there are now tools to actually prove a smart contract or a program is correct.
These tools do not solve the problem, because "correct" is entirely subjective. With those, you can prove that the program doesn't violate its own invariants or contain certain logic errors, but you can't validate that the output for the human is correct. No amount of fuzzing can solve this.
I mean, I could say that you sound like the old fogies in each generation like Steve Ballmer who famously yelled "search is not a business!" People just don't get how the next generation of users could POSSIBLY find something useful, which they don't see useful. It's like people drew the future with flying cars, when in reality the innovation was in something else.
In a regular database, I can't have an election because someone can go in there and change all the votes or stored procedures. I can't trust the code. I can't trust the database. One person with one key can change everything.
You know what's better than that? People being able to only act as themselves, and the rules being enforced by multiple machines. As I said, it doesn't have be "a blockchain", but what I described is the defining features of "smart contracts". It's simply more resilient than any middleman, and it makes it much, much harder to corrupt the system to extract rents. The system ends up being neutral, and all the "profits" are either taken out of circulation or accrue to the participants. There is no parasitic investor class in the end. People sell the tokens once and then they circulate among network participants. There are multiple gateways to get or cash out of the token instead of one (like cashing in/out of PayPal using PayPal Inc only). It's very hard to shut the system down or exclude certain groups from it. In all these ways (except the last one perhaps, depending on who you ask), it's strictly BETTER than centralized, closed, privately-owned systems. Why do Web2 maxis hate all these improvements?
You’re jumbling up a lot of things here. Fixing the economic paradigm does not lead straight to crypto. Maybe it’s part of the solution in some areas, but it doesn't prevent capitalism or encourage open source bootstrapped enterprises.
The closest thing IMO to a swing at fixing the economic paradigm would be something like requiring all companies to be nonprofits once they go public or something…
Who pays volunteers on Wikipedia, Linux, BSD, Webkit, Chromium, PHP, Python and all those other technologies and languages who have taken over the world? Is TimBL rich through extracting rents from all users of HTTP?
Vitalik is mega-rich from selling his tokens once, and now he doesn’t control the network. That is the alternative I am talking about. The developers of a successful project make buck but then the project becomes bigger than them. There were was an article posted the other day from an open source author complaining that they are now being required to use two-factor authentication before they can continue releasing their product. They said “well, I guess I don’t pay for the distribution platform, so I will take what I can get.” But they are missing the point entirely — the distribution platform isn’t supposed to serve the one author/maintainer. It’s supposed to serve the public! Those are the actual customers, and even if the author pays $1,000,000 a month to such a service, the value to the public of NOT having a security backdoor on the next update can become far, far greater. At some point, what you built just becomes bigger than you.
That’s why science has peer review, wikipedia has talk pages and open source commits have reviewers before merging the code. No one wants something to be rolled out at 5am on the whim of one guy, EVEN IF he has two factor authentication.
There is a fundamental, fundamental difference in mindset between on the one hand the celebrity culture we have on Twitter, and various entertainment, and the peer review culture of science, wikipedia and open source. The latter is far more useful to society.
In fact, most of our divisions and strife in demicracies is a result of for-profit news media trying to write one-sided outrage articles with clickbait titles because the market selects for that, while our social network algorithms surface this and put us in angry echo chambers because that leads to the most “engagement” (and therefore, profit). Once you see it, the profit motive IS WHAT CORRUPTS these networks. Wikipedia and Linux may have their faults, but not these.
Who pays the volunteers? No one. They have enough financial stability to spend an hour here and there making a commit. There doesn’t need to be a billion dollar investment by any party to advance the thing forward. They’re like ants… and it beats closed profit-driven silos in the end.
>Who pays volunteers on Wikipedia, Linux, BSD, Webkit, Chromium, PHP, Python
In order: Wikimedia Foundation, various companies, various companies, Apple, Google, various companies, various companies. Most of those developers are paid. The wikipedia editors are unpaid volunteers, but the IT staff isn't.
It is easy to check in a variety of ways, including calling their API of contributors. Where would Wikipedia get the money to oay this vast army of people? And even if they did, divide the amount they raised by the number of contributors and tell me if it is a meaningful amount compared to what employees are paid in the capitalist company model.
No, I asked my question assuming we lived in the world you’re suggesting where all software is built by volunteers in a utopian gift economy. I am asking who pays your volunteers. The question is semi-rhetorical.
The answer as GP points out is that in the majority of these cases open source software is still funded by capitalists. Wikipedia content presumably being largely a volunteer effort doesn't change this. Something still has to fund Wikipedia's existence. Wikipedia and signal for example are funded by nonprofits. I quite like this model which is why I suggested it in my previous comment.
The main point is that you can’t just tell everyone to work for free and still call it capitalism or even expect it to work at all. That’s what it sounds like you’re suggesting… I like your challenge to the capitalism/socialism dichotomy. I think your solution is lacking some sophistication in understanding how the open source landscape works, what motivates people and how to yield production, and is kinda out of touch with reality.
I think it’s quite the reverse: rather than being out of touch with reality, it is based on behavioral economic studies of reality ignored by capitalists. Watch for example this video: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=rbR2V1UeB_A
The way they would be able to contribute is that the UBI would allow them to negotiate shorter workweeks. They’d use the time for other things, like taking care of their own children and parents, rather than sticking them in a nursing home and public schools.
Honestly I’m not even sure what we’re talking about anymore. I definitely agree we need a way as a society to have families raise their own kids and break the power couple plus daycare dynamic. But I doubt a volunteer economy would achieve those results. We need to make homemaker a socially prestigious occupation and provide people doing that role more of a support system and structure so they can participate in the economic machine and feel/be valued the same way “breadwinners” are. Then they’ll be seen and see themselves as equals.
Also the Atlassian example in the video is meh. The people aren't working for free. They’re working for a paycheck. The company just lets them have autonomy for one day a quarter. So 4 days a year they get to work on what they want instead of what their managers want and this is your example of how a volunteer economy supported by UBI will work? Have you paid any attention the last 2 years? People don't work if they don't have to feed their family and pay the mortgage… I think you’re conflating innovation with grunt work. Until we have robots to do all the grunt work, UBI is a pipe dream. And I say that wanting it for myself just as much as the next person… so I’m with you there.
Metapoint. You seem to keep significantly editing your comment, so I don’t know what’s been voted or commented on. Either responding, or editing with the —-EDIT—- line would help there.
Outside of maybe freshman politicians I would think that corruption exists with many, if not most, politicians in the US as well. I can't speak to other countries but power tends to corrupt.
I don't know of a more corrupt industry than the taxi industry. The tight control of supply via taxi licenses, the low pay of drivers and the inability for any incumbents to enter. It was horrendous and hugely profitable for those in power and exploitative for anyone needing such services.
All you have to do is look at cities where they don’t have Uber and you’ll find a strong taxi mafia. Sometimes a literal taxi mafia like in Budapest.
I was living in Valancia Spain, the first day I got there I remember walking down what turned out to be one of the main streets in the city to find it being blocked by hundreds of taxis in a peaceful protest. Ok fine, I didn’t know why and it was all cosure with the police.
Then a few months later my ability to use a good quality app with verifiable trust (extremely important in some parts of the world) and recourse to the operator was suddenly taken away.
I had to order taxis using one of the crap taxi middlemen apps which offer little to no support for when things go a wrong and I was back to riding in cars where the driver was actively trying to rip you off.
Oh you’ve lived here 10 years but you need to look on the map of where one of the main streets is? Ok great, make sure the meeter is started before you do that.
Oh it’s after 8pm so that short 4.50€ journey is automatically a minimum 6€ Ok great enjoy.
25€ to the airport? I’m sure this used to be 14…
Taxis suck, lack accountability and will do anything it takes to maintain their market share while providing a horrible scammy service.
2 wrongs don't make a right. Uber operates like the mafia. I'm not going to take their defense just because they are a "just an app" or that the competition is as bad...
Uber became popular because it leveraged VC and cheap credit to subsidized rides, it's becoming much less popular as we speak since ride fares are going up fast and it now needs to actually make money.
When you have a massive leak of pervasive illegal behavior throughout the company, from the CEO down, and your response is...
>> "Kalanick’s spokesperson said Uber’s expansion initiatives were “led by over a hundred leaders in dozens of countries around the world and at all times under the direct oversight and with the full approval of Uber’s robust legal, policy and compliance groups”."
... I don't think that messages what Kalanick’s spokesperson thinks it messages.
I literally left Uber and moved to Japan. Mostly because I could not stand inequality I saw in SF and US. Did feel like Uber wasn’t great for full time drivers as well and it bothered me a lot and always on my mind.
So I did that.
You ever actually do something like that or are you just giving theoretical advice based on stuff you’ve never done?
Easy to say stuff like this. Tell me when you’ve actually done something similar yourself.
There's nothing special or enlightened about choosing the life you want to live. Plenty of people do it, for better or worse outcomes. Give it a try, start with a low consequence decision, take it, and see what momentum you build.
I’m glad you had the determination to do something like what you did. You sound like a better person than me. Keep doing what you’re doing - need more folks like you who actually walk the walk.
Uber’s behavior was well-known from 2014-2018. I never even considered them for employment.
Do you want a gold star for taking a job at an immoral company, exiting that SF tech cesspool because of “inequality”, doing a runner to a comfortable, wealthy country that only someone privileged could afford — and then pretending that move made you a saint?
I’m really disappointed that you would take such an antagonistic stance towards what I said and twist my words.
I am not a saint. I never said I was. You, my friend, are also not a saint. I suggest you make arguments based on things you have actually done yourself. Be better. I’m trying to better as well.
Still a million times better than what it replaced. About 20 years ago I was working with the Australian taxi cab industry. The hq of the regulatory authority shared the address of the main payment system. The regulatory authority was made up of representatives of each taxi cab company that each had one vote. There was one taxi company (the one that controlled the payment system allowed) with 200+ subsidiaries that made up that organization. If anyone tried to get into the taxi industry they'd use their 200 votes to say they are not allowed by regulations. This was a company making 2billion a year in one state of Australia alone (NSW). It was so incredibly fucking corrupt and i am thankful to Uber Lyft and all the other incumbents for managing to get their foot in. It required dirty dealing to get past this corruption.
It’s hilarious how everyone acts like the pre-Uber taxi world was one of generous wages, honest hard working companies, and politicians working hand in hand with stakeholders.
The taxi industry was (is?) insanely corrupt. There are literally state-sanctioned limits on taxis and artificial markets for medallions that made early purchasers absurdly rich.
Forget the reason for the change a minute, and focus on the outcomes. You've replaced a terrible set of local players with a handful of international mega players who I'd argue are just as crap as the ones you've displaced. There is still corruption in the sense that these platforms make the rules, and the drivers have basically no freedom to push back (baring some form of unionization).
All of this medallion nonsense can just as easily come back with Uber whenever they feel that competition has driven down prices too low. With a wink and a nudge, all the large players will play ball because they can.
As for what it is today, these companies still aren't profitable which means you're still living in a halo of speculative investment supporting you're current quality of service. The only viable remedy is to raise rates, which puts the service as a more expensive solution that could actually cost more than taxied ever did in the long run.
> You’ve replaced a terrible set of local players with a handful of international mega players who I'd argue are just as crap as the ones you've displaced.
You’ve clearly not used both a taxi pre-Uber or an Uber.
I’d wager my annual salary that a poll of users would rank the user experience of app based ride hailing as superior to that of the previous options. Uber didn’t even start out cheaper than taxis. They just slowly won out by being better. Cheaper just helped them grow faster later on.
Plenty of people outside of cities, especially in suburban America, never use taxis, and many who have cars don't use Ubers/Lyfts. Coming from your perspective it may seem implausible but consider another perspective.
You don’t understand Uber’s business model. They want prices so low because that’s how they make money. Lower prices equals more rides. They know that the higher the prices the less overall rides they will get. You thinking that the goal is to raise prices is literally 100% wrong.
In Brazil during their worst recession in decades, they had something like 300k drivers. This dropped the prices to the point where so many more rides occurred that everyone made more money and the customers were happy because the prices were low. That’s what they are going for, not some sort of moat based on raising prices.
You can't lower prices to below costs and make money. If they're not profitable now, to become profitable they need to either cut costs or raise prices.
The only reason to have prices below costs is to gain market share so you can do one or both of those later.
What costs do you think Uber has left to cut that they haven't at this point? Maybe workforce.
This is all a common well known business tactic, which many businesses have used in the past to establish market position. It's what they'll do with that market position people are worried about.
I confess I know nothing of Uber's running costs but in my layman's understanding I think GP point is still valid. Driver buys the fuel and services the car. How does having more rides cost Uber more?
If they pay the driver more than they charge the rider which they have specifically done at points in the past, then every ride costs them, even if their other overhead is zero.
In the past they did this to achieve market dominance over taxis and lyft because they were drowning in billions of dollars of VC money, and the whole point of getting all that money is to become a market leader as soon as possible, even with loss-leading strategies.
You can do the math and find an approximation of the price–demand relation ship ( assuming you adapt prices to keep your business profitable, and users react by adapting demand).
This system has two fix points, one at the normal taxi price and much much lower. Point is , the second fix point needs the majority of the population to stop using a privat car…
I really don't think you're arguing in good faith here.
You're using unsourced anecdotes to support Uber and aggressively attack its competition, while ridiculing anyone who does the same for the "other side".
There's a lot of nuance to this debate, but you're not providing any.
The technology definitely made life easier for passengers, especially in big cities. Prices were cheaper for some time, but only because they were subsidised by investors, so hardly a net gain. Arguably, they made the environment worse by pushing middle income off public transport and into taxis
For drivers, things seem to have got worse. I’ve spoken to various taxi drivers, including current and former Uber drivers, and none of them liked working for Uber. They merely felt trapped.
But there is an argument to say that the local taxi cartels needed breaking up, and only a company prepared to engage in these kind of tactics could have done it. I don’t know what I think about all this.
A key point here is that Uber didn't just disrupt taxi cartels, it also undermined public transport services. In places like Miami it even became a sanctioned alternative to bus routes that were cut. To me this is the true long term damage of their VC-funded predatory pricing model.
Technically, yes. For a while they provided vouchers to reimburse riders for using Uber instead of the public bus system.[0] Now those particular night bus routes have returned to service, but others have been reduced or canceled. This has been happening for the past 10 years or so all over the US.[1] It's not clear if Uber is the primary culprit, but it certainly doesn't help.[2]
USA centric answer here: In flyover country, in most cities ride share has been life changing for people that would be stuck using overpriced local taxis (in smaller 80K-150K person cities taxi rates are confiscatory and service is often VERY limited) or terrible public transportation. Terrible meaning, a $2 bus ride that takes three and a half hours (of which 2 hours is sitting in the elemets) out of their day vs. ride share taking 10 minutes and $15.
Honestly, I'm not sure where the idea came from that outside some of the largest cities, public transport or taxis even were viable options. Now there's uber/lyft everywhere, because there's always someone with a car who would like to make some money.
The idea comes from many other countries where 80k-150k cities have public transport services that don't require people to spend 2 hours sitting in the elements waiting for a bus.
> USA centric answer here: In flyover country, in most cities ride share has been life changing for people that would be stuck using overpriced local taxis (in smaller 80K-150K person cities taxi rates are confiscatory and service is often VERY limited) or terrible public transportation.
And if Uber/Lyft had confined themselves to delivering reliable transport at a reasonable price in Indianapolis, Pittsburgh, Cleveland, etc. people would be singing their praises.
But they didn't. Because those places weren't just unprofitable but were wildly unprofitable.
Which is stupid because I suspect being a reliable broker between driver and client could still be profitable. Having someone put in "I need to go from A to B at time X." and having a pool of drivers who can go "I'm going to B anyway, so why don't I adjust my time and make some money for doing so." would be a good thing in "flyover" country.
However, it won't be venture capital profitable. And that's really the crux of the problem here.
> But they didn't. Because those places weren't just unprofitable but were wildly unprofitable.
Uber as a company is "wildly unprofitable" across the board. I cracked open Uber's 2021 annual report, and I'm not sure they are profitable anywhere. Their revenue model really appears to support the notion they are simply displacing taxi operators, "23% of mobility bookings came from 5 cities..." and listed only NYC and Chicago in the US.It went on to say that 11% of mobility bookings came from airports (and that revenue stream was under attack from the taxi industry).
> However, it won't be venture capital profitable.
I've never had a VC ask for profits. Only growth where revenue and expenses would show we could trim the sails and break even in a pinch. Since Uber is publicly traded, I suspect they are going to have to do better than an annual report that basically projects profitability like I do winning the lottery.
> I’ve spoken to various taxi drivers, including current and former Uber drivers, and none of them liked working for Uber. They merely felt trapped.
I live in the U.S. I speak to almost all of my rideshare drivers about how they feel about their work. Literally none of them have expressed the feeling that they're trapped. (And not one has said that he would prefer driving a taxi.) They do make criticisms, more of Uber than of Lyft. But the main sentiments that they express are appreciation of scheduling flexibility and of not having a boss.
This is the second time I see you mentioning drugs in this thread [1], I genuinely don't understand the correlation or the argument you're trying to make?
The people who are currently working for Uber think working for Uber is a good deal. You might get similarly positive reviews from the buyers of scratcher lottery tickets.
There are a lot of articles from random websites saying that it is a good deal, and given the ease of placing such content I think we should be skeptical. Every time I see an article from a driver, who is not a pro blogger in the space, and who’s done the math, it is usually pretty negative to neutral.
It’s actually really hard to know if you’re making money when you take things like capital depreciation and opportunity cost into account, and sophisticated businesspeople make this mistake all the time. The average driver could easily be fooled until it’s too late.
It would be nice if capitalism did correct price discovery here but we’re dealing with a market which has been highly distorted, both from questionable government regulation and taxi monopolies AND from insane startup valuations and investment. The only accountability moment has been the public markets and even then it’s pretty mixed.
Uber has overwhelming power over their drivers and if it was actually a good deal for them it would be the first time in the history of labor relations that a company left
money on the table out of the goodness of their heart. Does Uber strike you as that company?
Yes I use ridesharing when I’m in the SFBA because there’s few other plausible ways to get around. I’m crossing my fingers the whole time that I’m not helping someone dig themselves deeper into a financial hole.
I love it. So you’re comparing the experiences of real drivers who don’t hate it to bloggers who are making mathematical calculations and you take the word of the bloggers. That’s just about par for the course.
“The poor dumb blue collar workers don’t know any better and need to be protected by the smarter elites who did the calculations!”
As far as I know, such evidence has never been released by Uber. I’m sure that Uber knows, or could, but I don’t think they’ve shared that info. They have an API called Movement which publishes anonymized data about trips, but I think cost isn’t available.
I don’t know if the 2018 data is still relevant, as there are complex incentives that vary in each market.
But, Uber (and similar companies) could probably end the questions tomorrow by releasing data or allowing researchers to have access to their drivers. The fact that they don’t, and that they instead spend $200M lobbying the governments to make an exception for worker protections for rideshare drivers (and tried to make that irrevocable without a 7/8ths majority!!) seems telling to me.
They didn't state the bloggers were making the calculations. The bloggers noted are pro Uber.
If you're going to just dismiss someone's point through an appeal to sentiment, you might as well get it right. Or maybe getting what was said right doesn't matter, and just recasting it as elitist as a tactic is the point.
I bet you know a lot of compulsive drinkers that view alcohol as a positive in their life.
I’m addicted to marijuana, but I still think it’s a good thing because it helps my PTSD. I don’t like being addicted to it, but I’m better off consuming it than not, although my addiction makes it difficult to regulate.
If you were to ask me that question, I'd say: I'd be as happy that my child drives for Uber, as much as I'd be happy they're driving for a taxi, limousine, or a bus.
It's a question I ask myself often when I see the disrespect Americans have for people in jobs they also consider essential. I have other questions for myself like, "how would I truthfully explain this to my mother?". If the answers make you feel shame, then that probably tells you something.
I wasn't aware I was making an argument. I asked a question (which was apparently loaded) and gave my thoughts. It's my experience that American society in general disrespects working class people - it's pretty clear from the stagnant wages and multi-generational political movement to suppress unions, so I understand why parents would not want their children to join that class.
> I live in the U.S. I speak to almost all of my rideshare drivers about how they feel about their work. Literally none of them have expressed the feeling that they're trapped
Just think about the subjective bias here. They're working, you're the customer - do you talk shit about your employer on company time? Everyone knows that has serious risks.
I was thinking the same thing. You need to actually be close friends to actual drivers, when not interacting with them as passengers, to hear how they actually feel about uber
To say "no-one is complaining" is factually wrong, since there have been multiple Uber strikes throughout the world over the last couple of years on these very issues. And I have spoken to Uber drivers that are complaining.
Whether they represent a majority of Uber drivers or just a noisy minority is more difficult.
I always put more weight on negative comments about owns work condition because cognitive dissonance is a known human bias.
If you are working at a dead end job, where your pays and benefits are sub-optimal, and you are even putting more work hours then in other possible jobs, then why are you working there? Because of cognitive dissonance it is much easier to tell your self that you actually like the job over accepting the reality that you probably shouldn’t work there.
> I live in the U.S. I speak to almost all of my rideshare drivers about how they feel about their work. Literally none of them have expressed the feeling that they're trapped.
if you ask a smoking addinct if they could quit, 80% say yes and 80% will fail if they try.
Now if you show they've done the math on depreciation of their car, worked for 10 years, etc. then maybe yoi have an argument
Uber and others should really have been punished harshly for dumping. Banned from operating without extra taxes to bring them in line with other operators and fined for billions.
> Still a million times better than what it replaced.
Uber didn't replace taxi. taxi was dying on it's own. Uber actually kept the bad designs of taxi going but they monopolized the Medallions.
"what it replaced" was the ongoing outcry to minimally decent public transit. Some of the international offshoots of the Occupy movement actually had this as their central theme.
People even use Uber in Europe despite having world-class public transit. That should tell you something about the utility it provides people: they could have used top-tier public transit but they chose to use Uber instead.
I don't know if this really qualifies as the same sort of thing, but I do recall hearing a story about cabbies somewhere in Asia:
A sociology professor I had assigned us a project to do something that would be "considered abnormal to the general public", and then document the results. He had mentioned over and over again to try and implement "as many safety measures as possible during planning". The professor went on to explain that the reason for harping on safety was such a big deal because a student of a previous class (decades before ridesharing) decided that their project would be to bring their personnel vehicle to where cabbies would line up. The student would instead offer rides to customers completely for free. I believe they even had a little sign they put on their window.
After this occurred two or three times, all of the cabbies completely boxed the students car in and called for the police to come. If I recall correctly, they were yelling, screaming, and honking at the student about how they were taking money out of their pockets. Some were accusing the student of taking customers to an undisclosed location and robbing them in order to get paid, while others were saying that doing this for free was essentially stealing from the cabbies, since the student didn't have a taxi permit.
I'm not sure if this was a matter of corruption as much as it was messing with/hurting people trying to make a living, but, I did think it was interesting that all of these different cabbies, from all of these rival taxi companies were all willing to work together spur of the moment, to stop someone who they couldn't possibly compete with. As I understand it, the depths of the rivalry between some of these companies ran pretty deep; it was shocking how willingly they all were to join up to crush this outside threat.
No, in Switzerland. Instead it managed to steal almost a billion USD from drivers in Switzerland alone and give others the "idea" they can break the law too.
Uber is the worst kind of business preying on the lower class claiming independence and freedom when it's the opposite and you are basically a working slave. It did everything possible to go around government worker protections.
I know a bunch of people who are happy Uber drivers as they couldn’t afford becoming regular taxi drivers. Do you often point out to your Uber divers that they’re lower class and being preyed on? How do they take it?
These are not fair comments because everything you say the taxi industry it replaced is guilt of and closing the market. Uber puts new cars on the road and opens the industry to those who are locked out.
No, but if a taxi industry is murdering people, and also helped create laws that prevent competitors from entering the market, I think it is OK to get around the laws that prevent competitors from competing with the taxi murder mafia.
My brother in law is a mechanic. He sees a lot of drivers who have a 3 year old car with 200k miles on them and basically a new car worth of repairs needed.
I also get a lot of happy drivers saying "this is my first day / week".
I see a lot of crazy driving too. All in all, it seems like there is a learning curve to being a profitable Uber driver. It is not necessarily easy to accomplish.
The ones who seem to anecdotally do best by it are the folks supplementing income by opportunistically taking fares here and there.
I love people who somehow think that taxi industry is filled with clean, perfectly maintained cars, fairly paid workers with great benefits and just the epitome of great citizens without any corruption.
It's insane. Thank God for tech companies for disrupting one of the worst industries on the planet. Uber and Lyft are, IMO, some of the best examples of the virtuous nature of "move fast & break things" as a business philosophy.
Uber are worse where I live. They cancel on you, they accept the fare and then just screw around for 20 minutes until you cancel, then if you try to rebook the price has magically gone up. At most times of day they are more expensive than the normal cab firms.
This all seems to come down to the rates of pay available to drivers getting worse, presumably as the VC money runs out. Thankfully the old cab firms have managed to cling on in the face of years of massive market distortion, and are still there to pick up the slack.
That's fine. They don't have to be better everywhere for me to be happy they exist. People attack Uber without dealing with the very obvious problem that in many, many markets, for both drivers and riders, they're an enormous improvement over the status quo.
And in many markets they were a market-distorting entity that drove already competitive firms to the wall by dumping VC money, meanwhile also circumventing rules which were in place for passenger and public safety.
In what markets did Uber decrease passenger safety relative to existing cab companies? I have literally never been in a locality where the cabs were safer than Uber.
So early on in London there were problems with drivers not having proper insurance to carry passengers, for one, so if anything went wrong there would be no cover (and the driver was technically driving illegally as insurance is required). In some places (again like London) there were also requirements for background checks and registration before someone could be a driver, which uber worked around or just ignored when they entered the market.
Okay. Not having taken London cabs, I cannot disagree with you. What I can tell you is that Ubers in NYC are much safer than cabs in NYC, and Ubers across Africa are much safer than their cab equivalents. To the degree that Uber's technology actually achieves something that cab companies cannot, it's punishing bad driver and rider behavior via the rating system.
> The ones who seem to anecdotally do best by it are the folks supplementing income by opportunistically taking fares here and there.
That's a large part of Uber's success: they are able to leverage the many people who have a car and occasionally have nothing better to do. There are even people who will drive for fun or as a way to kill boredom. Of course, those people will happily take a fraction of the pay that a professional taxi driver would. And those rides will be cheaper for consumers compared to taxi rides.
It's of course a problem when regulators disallow them to leverage this large class of drivers. When they are forced to operate like a taxi operator, a big part of their value proposition is gone. This is bad for consumers and Uber, but good for taxi operators.
> It's of course a problem when regulators disallow them to leverage this large class of drivers. When they are forced to operate like a taxi operator, a big part of their value proposition is gone. This is bad for consumers and Uber, but good for taxi operators.
It's only good for customers when they need to get a ride for certain times and only for some time. One of the reasons why taxis get regulated is because taxi companies need to guarantee service throughout the day. Drivers who only drive on the side will not provide that service, moreover if the regular taxi drivers are driven into bankruptcy because of uber drivers taking all the profitable times prices on average actually go up and especially for off peak times.
> [Mechanic brother] sees a lot of drivers who have a 3 year old car with 200k miles on them and basically a new car worth of repairs needed.
At the median rate for my city (Boston), those drivers were paid $1.07/mile* or $214K. They probably paid under $50K in gas, oil, tires, and repairs to that point, so they’re quite a bit ahead even if they have to throw the car away. Even at $0.66/mile for some of the worse cities, that’s still $132K in gross income.
Not that I doubt an article on a predatory loan website but…
You make the assumption that they are driving ~3800 miles a week and I can tell you, as a truck driver who is mostly out on the highways, there’s no way in hell they are doing those kinds of miles city driving. That’s like 550 miles a day seven days a week.
When I drove a cab the lowest rate was $1.45/mile (for medical vouchers) and some days it cost me money to haul people around and my expenses were only like $140/day (gas + lease). Though, once in a while I’d have a really good day with some big cash calls and take home a few hundred bucks but mostly I averaged ~$100/day take home (before taxes which I didn’t actually pay). Mostly, depending on the season and what was happening in town.
A lot of people eat peanuts, but a handful of people die from them. Should all people be made to eat peanut butter?
Uber is only a good company if it improves, yet somehow there is a never ending online narrative that "It's treating me well, so it's great for the world!".
They swapped masters from evil medallion rent seekers to software engineers. I’d pick the engineers any day and I’m glad they broke corrupt laws to make changes.
Taxi medallions ain't a thing in many countries. Many countries had proper regulated taxes with good drivers and clean cars (or vice versa). Now it's a shitshow with beaten Prius and a shithead behind the wheel.
I agree we should probably say "licenses" and not "medallions" when talking about policies all over the world, it's just that medallions are known as the worst example of corruption and regulatory capture, protecting incumbents while incredibly claiming this helped stranded people who need to get home when no taxis can be found.
At the peak these licenses were going for a million dollars each.
I think Uber, Lyft, and others are serving a great good in substituting for taxis in filling the need for road travelers. Taxi drivers may argue that the drivers are being abused, but we can't all have (nor do we all want) jobs with lots of protections.
Being a driver should be a job anyone could take while on the road to reaching their dreams in life, and not restricted to a lucky few who demanded the government give them a monopoly on the gig.
No, licenses-for-million-money did not exist outside of some markets.
Previously you'd get into taxi and then tell address. And refusing not-profitable-enough service was illegal. Now drivers see the route beforehand and can skip it.
A job should allow people to make a good wage and make a living out of it. It shouldn't be race-to-the-bottom for the profit of few by sacrificing quality of service.
Of course they could not compete: if your competitor flaunts the law, avoids the regulator, does not pay local taxes and externalizes a whole pile of things then there is no level playing field. It would be extremely surprising if they could compete.
The regulator is the taxi industry. More local taxes are paid because more drivers exist. The rules around the playing field are in favor of existing monopolies and they haven't changed.
The existing cartel wasn't fair. Having Uber open the door has allowed smaller players into a closed market. The taxi industry is still healthy and slightly more modern because of this.
Good for you. That's not the case here. Taxi companies employ people, pay wage taxes, sales tax, have their vehicles inspected once per year and in general are marginal business, except for the few in the biggest cities where it is a good business. Uber only went for the easy wins, siphoned off a large chunk of the profits in return for people working without a safety net and who do not pay into the social system, which works fine until it doesn't and then society has to pick up the tab.
Can't compete against a service that "sells" $2 worth of labor for $1. Now that the VC-funded subsidies are running out, we'll see how competitive Uber really is.
Selling a good at a loss in order to jack up the price later (the desired Uber play, though it seems like it's backfiring) used to be called "dumping", but...eh.
It doesn't have to be competitive on price. I'd use it at twice, or even three times the price of a cab, simply because the service delivers on what it promises, without unnecessary fluff.
I remember having to plan around the expected number of cabs that wouldn't bother to show up after quoting "10 mins" to get to SFO. Or having a London cabbie decide that my being sat in his cab was a license to spout pro-Brexit nonsense for 15 minutes and then claim that he didn't take credit cards. Or NYC cab drivers blatantly flouting the law by purposely ignoring you if you had a suitcase, because they didn't feel like taking a fixed fare in traffic to JFK.
> It doesn't have to be competitive on price. I'd use it at twice, or even three times the price of a cab, simply because the service delivers on what it promises, without unnecessary fluff.
That is indeed how much Uber cost when it first came out. Particularly because they sent out nicer luxury cars and had to hire limo drivers. Uber used to be called UberCab, but the medallion cartel didn't let new entries in so easily and forced the change from UberCab -> Uber, and also made it so they had to use luxury limo drivers. Still, users chose and taxis died, rightly so.
The unit economics are there that whatever Taxis charged Uber should be able to charge the same or less. If anything Uber et al are removing overheads not adding to them. The only way taxis would be cheaper would be if they were dodging taxes with their "no credit cards" policies.
I've had ride hailing drivers cancel fairs or mark the trip completed on me before showing up. I suppose I've had worse taxi experiences overall, though.
> I'd use it at twice, or even three times the price of a cab, simply because the service delivers on what it promises, without unnecessary fluff.
I think you're in the minority. And remember that the subsidies went both ways - one reason Uber was able to attract so many drivers initially (and thus provide great service) is that they paid them more than driving a cab would.
Wait... what? I think you need to follow the capital and who is exploiting the means of production here.
In formerly-medallion markets, surplus value collection shifted from medallion rent seekers to VC and private equity rent seekers. In non-medallion markets, existing normally run companies had VCs price-dump an unbeatable competitor into their market. Software engineers (and what inherent "good" is there to "software engineers," anyway??) are also in the middle, albeit with more of an ownership stake thanks to RSUs.
I don't see how it's slavery to work for uber.
If uber wasn't there, the drivers would be either unemployed, working another minimum wage job, or taking 30 years loans to get Taxi licenses(which most of them wouldn't be able to get).
This is a really simplistic view of labor dynamics and almost certainly too simplistic.
Jobs don’t exist in a vacuum. When a job is created sometimes it spurs other jobs, but sometimes it removes them. It is a really dynamic system full of feedbacks and feed forwards.
I think I read somewhere where someone actually modeled the dynamics behind uber eats, and found out that it resulted in net-negative jobs... That is every worker for uber-eats meant that more then one other worker didn’t get a job, not to mention the worse condition of that one worker that actually had the job.
I read the article you are referring to and it actually came to the opposite conclusion from what you’re saying: net-positive jobs, more spent and more earned.
(If you’re wondering how I am rebutting runarberg when neither he nor I cited a source, that’s a darn good question. But let the record show I offer just as much evidence as he.)
I can draw out a plausible model right now that results in net-negative jobs. Driving factors include:
* Food vendors that previously had delivery downsizing their own delivery staff and offloading it to uber eats.
* Restaurants not wanting to pay the service fees to uber eats gets fewer customers from the lowered exposures (as customers start ordering mostly through the delivery app), and eventually shut down.
* Restaurants that previously didn’t do delivery getting less money per customer as the delivery services take their share. And is forced to cut down on their opening hours and some of their staff to make up for the loss.
I never read that article you are referring to—if it even exits. The point was that labor dynamics are more complicated then: If a job is created, someone will work that job.
If we transfer over to the taxi market. There are examples of city government using Uber as an excuse to cut bus lines. Some bus drivers hence lost their jobs, and some companies probably lost their workers as the commute became to hard.
Now you’re just making things up? Why not either link to the source of your claim? I’m willing to believe what you’re saying is true but you’ve got to link to something, not just make up “models” (using the term very loosely here) out of whole cloth.
Also: how is “restaurant has no customers and has to close” Ubers fault? I guess restaurants never closed before Uber eats existed, or is Uber to blame for those business failures as well?
There’s plenty to criticize Uber for but blaming them for the closure of a restaurant that can’t attract customers is simply ridiculous and makes clear some people simply in this thread will blame anything on Uber regardless of whether the accusation even makes sense.
I am just making things up. My point was never to claim that uber eats has a net negative effects on available jobs, just to hint that it might be the case as an argument against GGGP claim that without uber the workers would either be unemployed or possess an equally sucky job.
> I think I read somewhere where someone actually modeled the dynamics
I know I’m being a little dishonest here. The fact is that I merely think I remember someone else talking about someone else doing such a thing. I never actually had the source, and I think I once saw a secondary source. But I didn’t think I actually needed—nor did I feel like wasting my time—to search for it. I figured it would be sufficient to demonstrate that such dynamics can theoretically exist.
Taxi Drivers in Switzerland typically earn around 40,700 CHF per year and Uber drivers make roughly the same if working full-time, more if they are working more than 40-hours a week.
Unless the union is able to explicitly explain their claim the Uber is somehow unfair to drivers, to me sounds like the union is just complaining they not getting their member dues.
Possible I missed something, so here are my sources:
Uber does not pay Social Security, Overtime, workers comp etc. When these people retire they have nothing, this money was effectively stolen from the workers.
Unia has successfully sued Uber at the highest courts and Uber recently lost. Geneva has banned Uber and others are expected to follow. There will now be an attempt to recover almost a Billion USD that is owed to drivers from Uber. [1]
Uber didn't "steal" anything as competition is not a zero-sum game. Drivers chose contract work over a full-time job, and it's their choice to save their income. Besides, pensions and Social Security aren't shields against elder poverty befalling spendthrifts. They're merely buffers and one's that come at the opportunity cost of being able to take the money at that point in time and investing it.
> And children chose to work in the coal mines and die of blacklung
Are you saying the average Uber driver has no more ability to make decisions for themselves than the average child? Uber drivers cannot consent? I reckon they must also be prevented from buying cigarettes and having sex? This is absurd. An adult entering into a voluntary contract is profoundly different than a child being forced into work, in fact it's the main thing that it means to be an adult. What sort of weird infantilization does this line of logic even come from?
> An adult entering into a voluntary contract is profoundly different than a child being forced into work, in fact it's the main thing that it means to be an adult
Ah, okay, let's deal with adults: can you volunterilly sell your organs, sell yourself into indentured servitude, or into prostitution? Can you buy heroin or uranium? Can you at least open a coalmine without health and safety and let other people agree to work in it when they know they will get blacklung? No, you can't even buy some financial products without proving you are a sophisticated investor.
You are not allowed to do shit like that because when we allow business to profit out of misery and misfortune of others, business will purposefully trap unfortunate and vulnerable. It isn't an adult vs another adult -> it's one man vs multi billion dollars of lobbying, marketing and legal department.
You're seriously comparing driving for Uber to working in a coal mine, selling your organs, and selling yourself into slavery or prostitution?
When I was in college I drove pizzas and Chinese delivery for $2 an hour plus tips. It was fine, and I was happy for the work, which was the best I could find part-time. I'd have been much happier if I could have driven for Uber, and I'd have missed rent payments far less often. Miss me with the "this should be illegal" stuff, it's a completely different thing than any of the other stuff you mentioned.
I know people for whom prostitution worked out great, some of them made serious money. Why shouldn't I compare one form of expoitation to another form of exploitation?
In fact I would rather have prostitution than people working at $2/hour.
Why do you think successfull business happens in UK/US/{Insert first world country} and not in Somalia?
It's the fact that we have law & order, educated population and infrastructure. These things cost more than $2 an hour to maintain. Now if you started your own business and end up making $2 an hour, thats one thing.
But when an international corporation systematically exploits our people by underpaying them, it's destroying local businesses who can't compete and routing taxes through panama, it's stealing from all of us.
If you focus on a single aspect and ignore all the other issues, sure, there's no problems whatsoever. But when gig economy jobs are the only jobs available for a certain person, it's hard to argue that they're entering those fully voluntarily. The only alternative to them is starving or getting assistance. In the case of Uber, they can cause long-term issues for workers who gamble on buying a car for the job. Additionally, they cause the higher paying versions of the job to disappear, cause taxes to go away, and force employees into not being able to plan for the future. As much as I enjoy having a single mini-cucumber delivered to my door in 10 minutes for a few euros (thanks, Gorillas), there are some extremely negative things that come with those jobs having replaced other better paying jobs.
"All the order did was state Uber & Uber Eats must treat drivers going forward as employees and Uber in response pulled out of the market."
That they would choose not to do business there at all, rather than pay people what they were entitled, is very telling of an operation that's in the business of exploiting people.
Of course it is controversal. There are sucessful businesses like Uber, AirBnB, Amazon etc. that base their success on collecting profits and outsourcing social costs to others. They have a lot of customers among HN readers and quite some supporters.
Heck, there is an entire spectrum of politics which state that pocketing excess value from the productions of others is wage-theft and thus exploitative.
The app doesn’t transport people from point A to point B which is the whole point of using it in the first place. They also specifically argue against any claims they are anything more than an intermediary between the producers and consumers.
Back in the day if you were working as a contractor you'd quote a price that reflected your higher costs. Let's say I'm an employee in a software company, that company may offer health insurance, if may provide me with a laptop, it may provide me with an office, it may provide me with severance pay if it lays me off, it will cover the various overheads of said office (electricity, insurance, whatnot). So if I'm an employee and I make $100/hour and I switch to being a contractor for that same job the company might expect to pay me $150/hour or $200/hour. Companies that employ contractors in that manner are fine. If a contractor is paid $70/hour vs. the full time employee $100/hour before overhead that's exploitation. A business that bends the laws so it can get away with attacking the business model of companies that are decent while at the same time exploiting employees shouldn't have a right to exist, isn't that pretty much the business model of organized crime?
Most of them are. But that's not the only criterium: Amazon for example is in the business of exploiting people by employing them directly under such poor conditions that the implict assumption is that few will stay for 2 years.
> Please link to English sources — as it makes it hard to hold you accountable for what appear to be false claims.
Google translate is your friend. Linking to local sources makes more sense than to link to some 2nd hand reporting in English media.
> Uber was neither banned, nor ordered to pay any money to government, union, or drivers. All the order did was state Uber & Uber Eats must treat drivers going forward as employees and Uber in response pulled out of the market.
Sounds to me like their business model was banned. Sure I guess pendantically that is not Über being banned, it still is the same outcome.
> As for the drivers, they were not forced to work for Uber and were aware of the impact.
The servs in 1800s russia also chose to work, so all is good?
> I personally do not agree with the ruling, since drivers were in control of when & where they worked and as such, they were not employees of Uber.
So what other companies did they work for? Also by your definition everyone who works from home (can choose where to work) and has flexible hours (chooses when to work) is not an employee?
> Thanks to the Union’s actions 1000s of people are out of work. Is the Union going to pay the Uber drivers the money they “stole” from them?
The Union did not break laws, Uber did
It seems you don't seem to believe in the rule of law.
>Please link to English sources — as it makes it hard to hold you accountable for what appear to be false claims.
I appreciate this post, thank you for the chuckle. It’s pretty rare to see somebody outright admit to being unwilling to use basic google functionality in the middle of a disagreement and request that the counterparty do the work for them.
> As for the drivers, they were not forced to work for Uber and were aware of the impact. I personally do not agree with the ruling, since drivers were in control of when & where they worked and as such, they were not employees of Uber.
They are effectively forced to work for Uber when the company eventually captures the market away from taxis, either due to subsiding rides and lowering prices vs taxi rides, or other offers that make them initially more attractive to riders than city taxis. After capturing said market by network effect you force more drivers to join because their customers are in the platform.
>Please link to English sources — as it makes it hard to hold you accountable for what appear to be false claims.
This is incredibly obnoxious. A) English language sources might not exist B) you can use Google etc translate so it's not up to the source provider to even find English language sources and C) you are assuming you are right.
There may be a disconnect here for those who are not Swiss. That very "idea" is arguably detrimental to the social health of a country like Switzerland (whose citizens appear to practice a sort of honor system when it comes to social norms and laws), while it may well be a non-issue in most other countries.
I think a global company like Uber will have a social impact, whether positive or negative, that very much reflects specific regions or nations, so white knighting Uber as a general proposition is not very sound.
This is the case for many other european countries aswell.
In the netherlands for instance, uber and many others got slapped down hard for circumventing the law according to the literal implementation of the law, instead of taking into account the spirit of the law aswell.
> Taxi Drivers in Switzerland typically earn around 40,700 CHF per year and Uber drivers make roughly the same if working full-time, more if they are working more than 40-hours a week.
You’re forgetting that one of these two person needs to pay for a car, car taxes, fuel and insurance by themself.
> No, in Switzerland. Instead it managed to steal almost a billion USD from drivers in Switzerland alone and give others the "idea" they can break the law too.
It seems that this ~billion USD is an hypothetical amount Uber would have had to pay if its contractors had been employees? If so, I'm not quite sure "steal" is the appropriate word here. It also ignores the many things Uber might have done differently if its drivers had been employees: increase fare rates, decrease driver payouts, hire less drivers, possibly get out of Switzerland entirely, etc.
wage theft comes in many forms. Most would use it to describe the deprivation of any pay or benefits as agreed upon or required by law. So not paying benefits required, reclassifying legal status of workers to avoid paying things, not paying overtime correctly, etc.
Well, and this is exactly the problem. They disrupted the market of ordinary taxis by undercuting the prices. Now that they are compelled to pay social contribitions their business is suddenly unprofitable.
As it was discussed in the other threads - Uber is not prohibited in Switzerland, they just need to adhere to the law same as everyone else. Somehow this seems to be a problem for them.
Jesus f with the "slave" overdramatization, that is just ridiculous. Most of the people driving for Uber would not have been driving cabs and living wonderful lives otherwise, they'd be slinging burgers at McDonald's or just unemployed. They wouldn't be making the choice to drive if it didn't make sense for them, which makes it "work", not "slavery".
I'm sorry that the world doesn't offer magical fairyland jobs that are super easy, require zero skill, and pay super well, I really am - as a society we should be aiming for an abundance economy fueled by automation, where everyone shares in the spoils. But running a business that gives people work that they are generally happy to have the option to take is not infringement on anyone's independence or freedom. Just don't drive for them, and you'd be in the exact same position you were in without them existing (unless you were profiting from the heavily cartel-ized taxi system which abused all the customers, in which case I can't give a bigger shrug).
Btw I'm being a bit coy about naming names but https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cabcharge#Findings_of_the_Taxi... has all the details of what i spoke about above in case any doubts how corrupt the taxi industry is (although absolutely no one has doubted that to be fair).
Maybe some places have shitty taxis, in my European corner I haven't seen anything good about Uber other than bringing the US gig economy of employee exploitation.
Not sure where you're located but I'm from Ireland living in the UK. In Edinburgh, all Ubers are private hire cars (it's not just anyone in 4 wheels). Uber has forced all of the major taxi firms to accept card payments, have apps with tracking, etc. Uber itself funnily is actually less reliable than the other operators. My experience in Dublin is the same. It's also completely removed the "take someone the scenic route and charge them 3x" (which happened to me in a taxi in Dublin from the airport in 2014!)
Meanwhile, visiting my parents in a smaller part of Ireland, getting a taxi involves phoning, waiting to see if they decide to pick up (if it's busy they don't), then having them tell you it'll be 10 minutes only to arrive after an hour, not accepting card, etc.
Irish taxis are unusual compared to taxis in other countries. They’re virtually all self-employed owner-operators like Uber drivers. They are individually licensed and usually own their own vehicles. They can take app or radio dispatches or pick up street hails. If taxis in other markets had taken the same regulatory approach, something like Uber may never have had such widespread success.
Laws and regulation are supposed to reign in bad industry.
Brigading and PR spin is rampant with Uber online for some strange reason, when in truth, they could provide a far better service by relaxing their tendency to spin bad PR by paying and insuring drivers better, and by operating more like a legit Taxi business.
It is NOT Uber that swept in and fixed the corrupt transport for hire system... It was passengers choosing a less expensive (subsidized by company investment) service, which is now dramatically increasing in cost to users now that they have stable market dominance.
The online PR spins only hold up for people who don't properly recall the past and for those who are unaware of the deception involved in use of "folksy" individual personal tropes used to over-simplify complex issues.
Not true. In SF when Uber started, it only had black cars and was meaningfully more expensive than a cab. The difference was that if you called a cab, depending on where you were in the city, there was a pretty decent chance you'd be told it'd take 15 minutes, but no one would ever show up. The Uber would be there 100% of the time.
Uber held drivers accountable. The taxi lobby did the exact opposite - they brutally abused an advantage gifted to them by the government because taxis are supposed to be a valuable public service.
In India it may be different, but in the US it continues to be extremely reliable.
> In India it may be different, but in the US it continues to be extremely reliable.
This is a hint at the main thing we need to remember: Uber replaced a terrible taxi situation in San Francisco. Every city is not like San Francisco. Every country is not like the US. Based on various comments here from people outside the US, some places already had functioning taxi systems, with reasonable prices, clean cars, and good drivers. Why is it ok that Uber got to flaunt regulations in those places as well?
I don't think it was ok anywhere. Even in SF I think it was beneficial but not "ok" in a general sense of fairness. The ends justify the means, I suppose. I'm not saying that Uber overall is a particular ethical company - I don't think they're great on that dimension.
Can you please not do this here? If someone else is wrong, please explain (respectfully) how they are wrong so the rest of us can learn.
If you don't want to do that, option 2 is to chalk it up to the internet being wrong about everything and walk away. But please don't post unsubstantive/dismissive/swipey things. That just makes everything worse.
Ok, Uber in particular may be very badly run and incapable of turning a profit. But on most places they have competitors that are profitable and usually, cheaper.
If they slash their operating developers from dropping out of the self driving cars race that would make them much more profitable. Whether doing so would be a good idea is another topic.
I wonder if there are any examples of a company that disrupted a bad industry with malpractice and then magically stopped it ones they succeeded.
For some reason I would think the opposite was more common, i.e. if a company gets away with bad behavior, they will continue to do so until stopped by their government authorities.
It is a known and unfortunate phenomenon that regulation winds up creating moats even if in service of good ends and intentions. Pulling up the ladder effectively happens to the benefit any incumbent who can afford something far more than upstart competitors. If say, a scrubber stack on factories doubles the equipment costs it favors the existing factory owners even if retrofitting is a hefty expense, it would buy them a moat.
Stopping on their own has to do with cost benefit analysis and is thus circumstantial. For a sort of in progress Amazon openly admits that they need to reduce turn over because they are running out of hiring pool. Their work conditions are still infamous but they set standards. That could ironically potentially mean a more competitive environment could have had worse wages. Not an arguement against it being a problem but an amusing irony.
Similarly deeper pockets mean a need to be less reckless as big payout judgements become collectable. If a fly by night roofing company has a worker fall and break their back from lack of safety equipment it may only have a few hundred thousand in assets total. If it is a state wide one they could be on the hook for millions.
This is a good point. Which is why I’m a big fan of general workers’ solidarity, including via unionization.
Solidarity among workers offers us a tool to combat these companies, and force them to make changes that benefit us at the cost of their shareholders. The union should be able to lobby the government to enact and enforce sufficient safety laws such that a worker will never be changing the roof over night unless adequate safety standards are met. And if a company fails, a worker has the means to refuse the work, regardless of the size of the company.
With solidarity we simply don’t have to wait for these companies to stop on their own, because we can collectively force them to stop, bottom up.
What is your point? Is it that we can’t have nice things and we should just settle with whichever company is able to make the most money from whatever corruption they can get away with?
You are posting an anecdote and non-substantiated accusations against an industry based on your area. And you are doing this under a news where they have evidence that their competitors are as corrupt as it gets, a company which has been accused in the past of violating labor rights, disregarding local laws, bribing officials, exploiting workers, etc. And your point is that their competitors in Australia are worse “because you say so”.
Nah, I’m not buying it. The fact that the Australian taxi industry is bad, does not excuse Uber’s conduct. In fact I don’t care what the state is in this industry regarding this conduct and I wish Uber all the worst.
I worry that stories like the above article will be used to justify outlawing ride share in favor of the cartels. This is actually the case in many jurisdictions where ride-share apps are still not allowed and the taxi industry still operates in a cartel fashion. I don't care about Uber or Lyft fwiw. No stake in either in any way shape or form.
My post is a very relevant warning (in my view) about allowing politicians to use the above stories as an excuse to close down an industry. They are looking for such an excuse. Be warned and call it out.
I think you might be focusing on the wrong thing here. There is no reason to outlaw ride shares, only ride shares that engage in illegal lobbying, labor violations, and disregarding of the law. In fact this is not specific for ride share companies, but companies in general (including traditional taxi cab companies).
People have been complaining about Uber not because it is a ride share company that undercuts the traditional taxi cab companies, but because they exploit their workers, bribe their elected officials, brake their local laws, and use VC funding to undercut their competitions. For this they should be outlawed.
I worry that stories like the above article will be used to justify outlawing ride share in favor of the cartels. This is actually the case in many jurisdictions where ride-share apps are still not allowed and the taxi industry still operates in a cartel fashion. I don't care about Uber or Lyft fwiw. No stake in either in any way shape or form.
My post is a very relevant warning (in my view) about allowing politicians to use the above stories as an excuse to close down an industry. They are looking for such an excuse. Be warned and call it out.
> Still a million times better than what it replaced.
Not really. It is not easy to paint existing systems with a wide brush. The situation in Germany is not the same as in Croatia which is not the same in India. I will always trust taxis in Mumbai and Berlin over Uber, whereas in a foreign location I will look for local options like Ola, Grab, FreeNow.
Uber did act as a catalyst for the incumbents to get off their butts, but it created another set of problems which are equally bad.
This is such a stupid simplistic view - read the BBC article on this leak of Uber files. The corruption they (Uber) instituted was just as bad as this anecdote you are alleging.
How does replacing one set of elite corruption with another set of elite corruption get to " i am thankful to Uber Lyft and all the other incumbents for managing to get their foot in"?? You are thankful to them? What are you on about?
Please don't post in the flamewar style to HN, regardless of how wrong others are or you feel they are. It's not what this site is for, and it destroys what it is for.
> It required dirty dealing to get past this corruption.
Why do you think the current state is "/past/ this corruption." It sounds like Uber spent a bunch of money to just "own the corruption for itself." On the whole, I don't believe it's an actual improvement.
You may like the state of the cars more, but the continued overt monopolization and the worse outcomes for labor are massively negative outcomes, even if you aren't in a position to be personally impacted by them.
I'm not sure that the uber competitors (taxis) followed the rules as much as some people seem to think. For instance, why is their card reader is always broken?
I’m sure the cab cartel was on life support and only tried to scam every tourist and sometimes even locals because they couldn’t make a profit otherwise.
Regardless of what you think about the company or their products, letting them get away with this sets a dangerous precedent in my opinion. Whether you agree with the specific laws they’ve broken, the precedent would allow companies to break other laws you might agree with more (and do more damage as a result).
Companies break laws every minute. Basically every US company operating in the EU is breaking GDPR post-Privacy Shield right now: it's illegal to transfer data of EU residents to US data centers.
Oil and gas companies have been blatantly breaking laws for decades.
Volkswagen, along with a majority of car manufacturers have been cheating emissions testing for ages.
Big banks literally rigged LIBOR through intentionally lying about numbers and laughing and not a single executive is in jail.
And they all set dangerous precedents, and now uber is setting yet another. And we all got dumber by taking the discussion to this direction. Enough defeatism.
To add to that, it could also be inferred that the Ubers of the world are able to get to where they are from the numbing affect of all the previous evilCorps that came before creating the death from a thousand paper cuts scenario.
They're just standing on the shoulders of evilCorpGiants?!
My point is that the precedent has already been set, and a company that essentially allowed people to transact freely (away from the taxi cartel and regulatory capture) isn't the straw that's going to break the camels back.
IMO there's a big difference between breaking the law to optimize some otherwise-legitimate activity and starting an entire business on something that (at least at the time) was illegal in most countries.
I find what Volkswagen did worse. They polluted our air beyond the acceptable limit. On the other hand, Uber broke taxi laws that were anti-consumer anyway.
Just like SMU wasn't doing anything the other schools were not doing. They just got caught. It is an example of how using the extreme punishment had a much larger collateral damage blast radius than intended.
Ohhh, they did a lot more then just braking taxi laws. According to this leak they engaged in illegal lobbying (which I would simply call bribery), and evidence tampering.
> Basically every US company operating in the EU is breaking GDPR post-Privacy Shield right now: it's illegal to transfer data of EU residents to US data centers.
This is not true and the devil is in the details. It's illegal to transfer "personal data" of EU residents. The definition of personal data under the GDPR is what US companies would consider PII or personally identifiable information and not all companies collect PII. In fact, I would argue most companies go out of there way to not store PII.
Not all companies store IP addresses. Or email addresses for that matter. And whether or not an email is PII depends on a lot of factors for your company but alone an email address is not legally PII.
>So basically everything uses pii even if it is only for bot and ddos protection
If I use Cloudflare for example, as DDoS mitigation, I am not storing PII, Cloudflare is and thus Cloudflare has to deal with the legalities of that.
Even just transferring is not allowed without consent. And if you are the "controller" (ie. you are using Cloudflare to serve your customers) you would take the fine, not Cloudflare. And IP and email are PII.
Maybe it's time for mandatory penalty minimum set somewhere in the 3-100x profits made due to breaking the law. I'm tired of reading about how e.g. an investment fund settled for 100M with no admission of guilt after making a billion breaking the law.
Think about the collateral damage caused by killing companies that break the law: lots of people lose their jobs, and most of them had nothing to do with the illegal act. That's not justice.
What is the point of this? That new companies should be even smarter than the stablished ones and therefore try to game the system even more? Or that we should learn from them and try to improve the situation and make all of them follow the rules?
His point was going after newer and smaller companies is a joke when larger companies are basically getting away with murder, or more accurately doing nearly the same thing you're punishing smaller companies for doing (at a larger scale)
As a citizen of a democratic country I still prefer the laws dictating what is harmful rather than a CEO and a member of the government unilaterally.
And if something goes wrong use the tools from a democratic regime to change it. Even with its drawbacks democracies are the best system known to rule countries.
> Basically every US company operating in the EU is breaking GDPR post-Privacy Shield right now
No expert but in New Relic you can select in which data center your data should be. In fact many websites of US newspapers are not accessible from the EU. Just recently I had to order a gadget through reship.com because I couldn't buy it directly...
Yes, but why are you saying this? Because you think we should allow more of it? Or because you think we have fundamental problems we need to fix? Or some other reason?
I despise how they operated from start through 2017. But do I wish Uber had never happened? Nope. Also, when you say "letting them get away with .." are you including Macron, Biden etc in "them'?
Inexcusable. Yet no considerable action will be taken against this corporation nor the corrupted, lobbied politicians that enabled this will ever be held accountable, let alone be cornered to resign from whatever seat they occupy. It's not a good indication for the future how the EU seems to be one giant toybox for fraudulent activities such as these, with all the recent scandals.. there seems to be very little interest in even just keeping a façade of legitimacy.
Biden being shown as a puppet in this context is certainly something.
Admittedly, Guardian is the only news site I check ever (last 5 or so years anyway), and even I am impressed that they went with a straight arrow.
Good job.
// Weird seeing downvotes for my reply without any comments/input. Just goes to show - ignorance is bliss.
> Warned that doing so risked putting Uber drivers at risk of attacks from “extreme right thugs” who had infiltrated the taxi protests and were “spoiling for a fight”, Kalanick appeared to urge his team to press ahead regardless. “I think it’s worth it,” he said. “Violence guarantee[s] success. And these guys must be resisted, no? Agreed that right place and time must be thought out.”
However, this is how all "unicorn" startups operate. Break the law until they get caught and pay a small fine. Uber will get away with this and people will continue to use Uber.
I don't think "they broke the law" has the same weight it used to. The American justice system has been so entirely captured by capital that such an accusation merely tells me that one of Uber's enemies spent real money on a PR firm.
Plus, the laws they broke are ones that almost no-one except taxi companies (and perhaps city tax officials) care about.
Interesting reporting about behavior that goes somewhat beyond business-as-usual for corporate lobbying efforts (not a justification, just a note that these kinds of tactics are relatively common and this report is not an extreme outlier, compared to pharmaceutical lobbying for example).
However, it's curious that there's no mention of Uber's largest backer, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, which put an unprecedented $3.5 billion into Uber (initially, that may not be all). All the article mentions is this:
> "From Moscow to Johannesburg, bankrolled with unprecedented venture capital funding, Uber heavily subsidised journeys, seducing drivers and passengers on to the app with incentives and pricing models that would not be sustainable."
Uber's relationship with Saudi Arabia certainly deserves some mention:
> "In the interview with the digital news platform, Khosrowshahi said the 2019 murder of Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi shows that "the (Saudi) government said they made a mistake. It's a serious mistake, but we've made serious mistakes, too right?""
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[ 4860 ms ] story [ 1277 ms ] threadThat is what people will reflexively say to any analysis that discusses the role of the profit motive and wall street earnings in leading to these outcomes.
The fact that systematic actions like this to amass advantages at expense of the public happen with regularity at Facebook, Google, Apple, Microsoft, Exxon Mobil, General Motors and many other for-profit enterprises, means there may be some room to improve the economic paradigm in which these things are built. And in fact, we have just such a paradigm, and the products of it (Wikipedia, Linux, etc.) are of a completely different character. They don’t have an investor class at all, that needs to recoup their investment by extracting rents forever.
The alternative to for-profit venture funded companies owned by Wall St doesn’t have to be communism or socialism. It can be a gift economy such Science, Creative Commons, or Open Source Software and decentralized permissionless networks based around protocols like HTTP.
For example, Uber can be replaced with an open source, decentralized marketplace that doesn’t take 50% of all drivers’ revenue, but has a free market and ratings / reviews operated by the community.
But if a project is funded by venture CAPITALISTS, subsidized by money-losing unit economics through multiple rounds, and then dumped on the public in a Wall St IPO, and subsequently owned by pension funds and other pools of capital, then yes that is a quintessential example of Capitalism. And the result is that there is an investor class that will always tell Uber’s board to maintain centralized control and extract rents from the public, squeeze drivers, as well as try to hack the society around them (as in this article: secretly trick, get around the police, lobby state officials) whereas an open source decentralized system wouldn’t do any of that.
The dream of cryptocurrency was that the developers would sell the tokens to the public and make money on the primary sale, but after that, the network would belong to the public. Even any royalties that could accrue (such as on every transfer of the token) would be above-board and disclosed once, so everyone knows the deal. Sadly, rather than focusing on a “peer to peer cash system” as Satoshi’s whitepaper said, the entire space switched around 2013 to “store of value”, HODL and speculative investment. It’s actually a cop-out that happened because blockchains can’t scale well.
Bitcoin was the granddaddy and it solved the double-spend problem, but in a very brute-force way, by gathering all transactions in the world in one place every 10 mins to search for a double-spend. It’s actually even worse than that, because every transaction has to be gossipped to every miner, and all mined transactions have to be stored forever in an ever-growing history. The tech is a straightjacket but the vision is good. We do need smart contracts to replace privately-owned middlemen, but we need the smart contracts to run on a better DLT than Blockchain. There have been tons of innovation since 2008 but Bitcoin maximalists and Web2 maximalists both deride all of it, so progress depends on open-minded people who look past the grift of utility-less coins long enough to build something useful
In reality, this seems to be what happens every time, empirically. So maybe this is just what real life capitalism is like?
1. Start out with a good idea.
2. Go through a golden period of good results, in which there is much innovation, and established dominant players are upended.
3. Revert to form, in which the newly dominant players prevent further change.
The key is not looking for the perfect system at step 2, but the one which causes step 3 to break down in the quickest time possible.
Sure! I volunteer you to build it for me.
Smart contracts are a horrible invention that don't do anything new. The equivalent in a normal SQL database (the original DLT) is just running a transaction; every SQL database under the sun has supported this for ages.
Smart contracts represent the first time in history when you can trust code to do what it says. The next best thing that even come close is Intel’s SGX extensions, where we trust Intel, or AWS key management service, where we trust Amazon.
The idea that everyone can custody their own private keys as they want AND no one can be “above the law” and circumvent the business logic, is really powerful. That assurance and level of trust in the code is what enables a whole slew of new applications that currently require human gatekeeper institutions, same as Web1 replaced radio, TV, newspapers, magazines, and centralized platforms like America Online, Compuserve and Minitel.
You just are myopically focused on the silly Web3 phase, same as people derided Web1 personal home pages with <blink> and <marquee> tags until the Web grew up.
For example https://intercoin.org/applications
This is extremely, extremely wrong. The operators of the network can change the smart contract VM whenever they want. There's nothing magic about it, the VM is just implemented in some code that all of the executor nodes happen to agree on at any given moment in time. In practice they don't change it, but neither would you if you were running a financial database on top of SQL.
And besides, the worst issue in software development is unintended bugs made by programmers. No programmer I know would ever trust any non-trivial code to simply "do what it says" because there could be complex bugs lurking in there somewhere. Smart contracts can't do anything about that, practically speaking they make it much worse by making it difficult/expensive to change the smart contract. There is nothing revolutionary or powerful about them, the point of them is actually to make them weak and expensive on purpose so the executors can charge increasing gas fees.
Edit: I looked at that list of applications, almost all of them could be done better without smart contracts or even without computers. Those things are all thousands of years old. The only exception on that list is NFTs, but NFTs are an entirely bogus concept that are yet another version of a ponzi scheme.
this is extremely, extremely wrong
Sure, they can “hardfork” the protocol in a backwards-incompatible way, but they’d have to get the fork adopted by everyone who is currently running (and “securing”) the other version of the database and its “stored procedures”. Often, the node operators don’t all know each other and it’s hard for them to all collude to run the hardfork. Often, the old network has large enough incentives for each individual to not switch, similar to how everyone always threatens to leave Facebook but it still has the same MAU because its network effect is so huge. Good luck leaving when all your friends are on it, etc. And Facebook doesn’t give you a steady stream of income, even. If it did, if you made more profit than it cost you to run a node, why wouldn’t you ALSO keep supporting the old network? I can think of one reason only — if the new network hardfork would pay you MORE and it would be a zero-sum game. It would have to break old contracts AND gain enough traction to pay all the node operators MORE than the old one. That’s quite a hurdle and becomes harder the bigger the original network was.
Bitcoin was forked multiple times, but even a sensible hardfork change like increasing the block size proved too hard to do. Bitcoin Cash and Bitcoin SV are around but most Bitcoin ”miner” nodes still run the tried and true old blue.
Ethereum team had to put a “difficulty bomb” in there to try to get the miners to upgrade. See Ethereum Classic, for instance, it is still being run, despite having no widely adopted applications or stablecoins on it. So even without utility, you can have shitcoins running for years, and you’re talking to me about how ALL nodes can just abandon it?
Now about the bugs and correctness. Look… first of all, no one is claiming that smart contracts will solve every single problem, neither did Web1 but it solved enough that everyone left AOL and CompuServe and MSN and joined it. That’s a FACT. They also left Encarta and Britannica which were quite popular capitalist enterprises, paying all editors top-down from their profits, and instead Wikipedia eclipsed them all. They are now a rounding error.
But you bring a fair point — since smart contracts must be immutable to be trusted (like UniSwap Factory, or many other protocols) they have to be audited and battle tested before the public can trust them with large amounts of value (elections, money, etc.)
The ultimate in this is Provable Correctness, and there are now tools to actually prove a smart contract or a program is correct.
The second place is what Cardano is doing — running fuzzing with massive amounts of input through what is essentially a functional programming language (Haskell). What is not enough about that? You get the best of all worlds… trillions of tests, and then immutable code you can trust.
Disclaimer: I am not building on Cardano and have no connection to their ecosystem. Just that they are focused on moving the space to a more provably correct set of smart contracts, and it addresses your concern.
I will double and triple down on it. I've been following this for at least a decade now. Smart contracts are completely useless and they need to go. The "epiphany" here is that it was obvious since The DAO transaction was reverted that there is nothing actually immutable about blockchains or smart contracts. If enough whales are threatened by some activity then they'll hard fork, because the miners/stakers all depend on the activity of the whales to realize their profits. The network doesn't exist without them, and it's not actually hard for them to collude.
This is another reason why it's futile for you to expect anything out of blockchains; they're not actually run by volunteers, by design they're run by the greediest possible participants who are supposed to do whatever they possibly can to maximize their profit from mining, because if they don't do this then the network collapses. This is entirely how the system is designed to work. You're not actually "trusting the code", you're trusting that a hardfork won't be successful for entirely non-technical reasons, i.e. that they would lose money. People who run ordinary databases also don't mess with the database for the same reason. Blockchains don't add anything new to this, they're not a good or even interesting invention.
>Bitcoin was forked multiple times, but even a sensible hardfork change like increasing the block size proved too hard to do
This is ahistorical, it wasn't hard to increase the block size, it was just undesired by the majority of the miners. BCH happened because some miners were upset about SegWit, a change that did actually succeed.
>The ultimate in this is Provable Correctness, and there are now tools to actually prove a smart contract or a program is correct.
These tools do not solve the problem, because "correct" is entirely subjective. With those, you can prove that the program doesn't violate its own invariants or contain certain logic errors, but you can't validate that the output for the human is correct. No amount of fuzzing can solve this.
In a regular database, I can't have an election because someone can go in there and change all the votes or stored procedures. I can't trust the code. I can't trust the database. One person with one key can change everything.
You know what's better than that? People being able to only act as themselves, and the rules being enforced by multiple machines. As I said, it doesn't have be "a blockchain", but what I described is the defining features of "smart contracts". It's simply more resilient than any middleman, and it makes it much, much harder to corrupt the system to extract rents. The system ends up being neutral, and all the "profits" are either taken out of circulation or accrue to the participants. There is no parasitic investor class in the end. People sell the tokens once and then they circulate among network participants. There are multiple gateways to get or cash out of the token instead of one (like cashing in/out of PayPal using PayPal Inc only). It's very hard to shut the system down or exclude certain groups from it. In all these ways (except the last one perhaps, depending on who you ask), it's strictly BETTER than centralized, closed, privately-owned systems. Why do Web2 maxis hate all these improvements?
You’re jumbling up a lot of things here. Fixing the economic paradigm does not lead straight to crypto. Maybe it’s part of the solution in some areas, but it doesn't prevent capitalism or encourage open source bootstrapped enterprises.
The closest thing IMO to a swing at fixing the economic paradigm would be something like requiring all companies to be nonprofits once they go public or something…
Vitalik is mega-rich from selling his tokens once, and now he doesn’t control the network. That is the alternative I am talking about. The developers of a successful project make buck but then the project becomes bigger than them. There were was an article posted the other day from an open source author complaining that they are now being required to use two-factor authentication before they can continue releasing their product. They said “well, I guess I don’t pay for the distribution platform, so I will take what I can get.” But they are missing the point entirely — the distribution platform isn’t supposed to serve the one author/maintainer. It’s supposed to serve the public! Those are the actual customers, and even if the author pays $1,000,000 a month to such a service, the value to the public of NOT having a security backdoor on the next update can become far, far greater. At some point, what you built just becomes bigger than you.
That’s why science has peer review, wikipedia has talk pages and open source commits have reviewers before merging the code. No one wants something to be rolled out at 5am on the whim of one guy, EVEN IF he has two factor authentication.
There is a fundamental, fundamental difference in mindset between on the one hand the celebrity culture we have on Twitter, and various entertainment, and the peer review culture of science, wikipedia and open source. The latter is far more useful to society.
In fact, most of our divisions and strife in demicracies is a result of for-profit news media trying to write one-sided outrage articles with clickbait titles because the market selects for that, while our social network algorithms surface this and put us in angry echo chambers because that leads to the most “engagement” (and therefore, profit). Once you see it, the profit motive IS WHAT CORRUPTS these networks. Wikipedia and Linux may have their faults, but not these.
Who pays the volunteers? No one. They have enough financial stability to spend an hour here and there making a commit. There doesn’t need to be a billion dollar investment by any party to advance the thing forward. They’re like ants… and it beats closed profit-driven silos in the end.
In order: Wikimedia Foundation, various companies, various companies, Apple, Google, various companies, various companies. Most of those developers are paid. The wikipedia editors are unpaid volunteers, but the IT staff isn't.
The answer as GP points out is that in the majority of these cases open source software is still funded by capitalists. Wikipedia content presumably being largely a volunteer effort doesn't change this. Something still has to fund Wikipedia's existence. Wikipedia and signal for example are funded by nonprofits. I quite like this model which is why I suggested it in my previous comment.
The main point is that you can’t just tell everyone to work for free and still call it capitalism or even expect it to work at all. That’s what it sounds like you’re suggesting… I like your challenge to the capitalism/socialism dichotomy. I think your solution is lacking some sophistication in understanding how the open source landscape works, what motivates people and how to yield production, and is kinda out of touch with reality.
The way they would be able to contribute is that the UBI would allow them to negotiate shorter workweeks. They’d use the time for other things, like taking care of their own children and parents, rather than sticking them in a nursing home and public schools.
My solution also helps women close the pay gap: https://magarshak.com/blog/?p=286
Also the Atlassian example in the video is meh. The people aren't working for free. They’re working for a paycheck. The company just lets them have autonomy for one day a quarter. So 4 days a year they get to work on what they want instead of what their managers want and this is your example of how a volunteer economy supported by UBI will work? Have you paid any attention the last 2 years? People don't work if they don't have to feed their family and pay the mortgage… I think you’re conflating innovation with grunt work. Until we have robots to do all the grunt work, UBI is a pipe dream. And I say that wanting it for myself just as much as the next person… so I’m with you there.
I was living in Valancia Spain, the first day I got there I remember walking down what turned out to be one of the main streets in the city to find it being blocked by hundreds of taxis in a peaceful protest. Ok fine, I didn’t know why and it was all cosure with the police.
Then a few months later my ability to use a good quality app with verifiable trust (extremely important in some parts of the world) and recourse to the operator was suddenly taken away.
I had to order taxis using one of the crap taxi middlemen apps which offer little to no support for when things go a wrong and I was back to riding in cars where the driver was actively trying to rip you off.
Oh you’ve lived here 10 years but you need to look on the map of where one of the main streets is? Ok great, make sure the meeter is started before you do that.
Oh it’s after 8pm so that short 4.50€ journey is automatically a minimum 6€ Ok great enjoy.
25€ to the airport? I’m sure this used to be 14…
Taxis suck, lack accountability and will do anything it takes to maintain their market share while providing a horrible scammy service.
Uber became popular because it leveraged VC and cheap credit to subsidized rides, it's becoming much less popular as we speak since ride fares are going up fast and it now needs to actually make money.
>> "Kalanick’s spokesperson said Uber’s expansion initiatives were “led by over a hundred leaders in dozens of countries around the world and at all times under the direct oversight and with the full approval of Uber’s robust legal, policy and compliance groups”."
... I don't think that messages what Kalanick’s spokesperson thinks it messages.
Talk about non-sequiturs.
Travis has not been CEO for 5 years. Based on this article, what do you want the people who actually presently work at Uber to do?
So I did that.
You ever actually do something like that or are you just giving theoretical advice based on stuff you’ve never done?
Easy to say stuff like this. Tell me when you’ve actually done something similar yourself.
Seriously glad for some light in the dark.
Do you want a gold star for taking a job at an immoral company, exiting that SF tech cesspool because of “inequality”, doing a runner to a comfortable, wealthy country that only someone privileged could afford — and then pretending that move made you a saint?
I am not a saint. I never said I was. You, my friend, are also not a saint. I suggest you make arguments based on things you have actually done yourself. Be better. I’m trying to better as well.
Granted, for that to happen, it would take a prosecutor to start a case.
The taxi industry was (is?) insanely corrupt. There are literally state-sanctioned limits on taxis and artificial markets for medallions that made early purchasers absurdly rich.
When corruption is enshrined by the law itself what other way do you have to fight it except to have the corrupt play off against each other.
The taxi industry existed for centuries (perhaps longer) in the cartel form. It's amazing progress to see that their power is no longer absolute.
The picturesque London Taxi driver lives on even today.
Many of the 21st Century's worst attributes aren't due to society falling apart in the digital age.
Online life is exposing the seediness of society, which wasn't reported in old world media.
Lying on the internet is... difficult.
And yet it is done many many times a day
All of this medallion nonsense can just as easily come back with Uber whenever they feel that competition has driven down prices too low. With a wink and a nudge, all the large players will play ball because they can.
As for what it is today, these companies still aren't profitable which means you're still living in a halo of speculative investment supporting you're current quality of service. The only viable remedy is to raise rates, which puts the service as a more expensive solution that could actually cost more than taxied ever did in the long run.
I sort of agree with your broader points. But this statement mangles the definition of corruption beyond recognition.
You’ve clearly not used both a taxi pre-Uber or an Uber. I’d wager my annual salary that a poll of users would rank the user experience of app based ride hailing as superior to that of the previous options. Uber didn’t even start out cheaper than taxis. They just slowly won out by being better. Cheaper just helped them grow faster later on.
You know this is extremely unlikely, so it's not good to base any argument on it.
> Uber didn’t even start out cheaper than taxis.
When Uber came to my city about a decade ago all rides were free to the passenger. So much cheaper than a taxi.
In Brazil during their worst recession in decades, they had something like 300k drivers. This dropped the prices to the point where so many more rides occurred that everyone made more money and the customers were happy because the prices were low. That’s what they are going for, not some sort of moat based on raising prices.
The only reason to have prices below costs is to gain market share so you can do one or both of those later.
What costs do you think Uber has left to cut that they haven't at this point? Maybe workforce.
This is all a common well known business tactic, which many businesses have used in the past to establish market position. It's what they'll do with that market position people are worried about.
In the past they did this to achieve market dominance over taxis and lyft because they were drowning in billions of dollars of VC money, and the whole point of getting all that money is to become a market leader as soon as possible, even with loss-leading strategies.
this sounds like you don't understand the concept of a business model.
This system has two fix points, one at the normal taxi price and much much lower. Point is , the second fix point needs the majority of the population to stop using a privat car…
You're using unsourced anecdotes to support Uber and aggressively attack its competition, while ridiculing anyone who does the same for the "other side".
There's a lot of nuance to this debate, but you're not providing any.
For drivers, things seem to have got worse. I’ve spoken to various taxi drivers, including current and former Uber drivers, and none of them liked working for Uber. They merely felt trapped.
But there is an argument to say that the local taxi cartels needed breaking up, and only a company prepared to engage in these kind of tactics could have done it. I don’t know what I think about all this.
As in... government justified cutting bus services by saying Uber was a viable alternative?
[0] https://www.miamiherald.com/news/coronavirus/article24182271...
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/03/13/upshot/myster...
[2] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S096585642...
Honestly, I'm not sure where the idea came from that outside some of the largest cities, public transport or taxis even were viable options. Now there's uber/lyft everywhere, because there's always someone with a car who would like to make some money.
And if Uber/Lyft had confined themselves to delivering reliable transport at a reasonable price in Indianapolis, Pittsburgh, Cleveland, etc. people would be singing their praises.
But they didn't. Because those places weren't just unprofitable but were wildly unprofitable.
Which is stupid because I suspect being a reliable broker between driver and client could still be profitable. Having someone put in "I need to go from A to B at time X." and having a pool of drivers who can go "I'm going to B anyway, so why don't I adjust my time and make some money for doing so." would be a good thing in "flyover" country.
However, it won't be venture capital profitable. And that's really the crux of the problem here.
Uber as a company is "wildly unprofitable" across the board. I cracked open Uber's 2021 annual report, and I'm not sure they are profitable anywhere. Their revenue model really appears to support the notion they are simply displacing taxi operators, "23% of mobility bookings came from 5 cities..." and listed only NYC and Chicago in the US.It went on to say that 11% of mobility bookings came from airports (and that revenue stream was under attack from the taxi industry).
> However, it won't be venture capital profitable.
I've never had a VC ask for profits. Only growth where revenue and expenses would show we could trim the sails and break even in a pinch. Since Uber is publicly traded, I suspect they are going to have to do better than an annual report that basically projects profitability like I do winning the lottery.
I live in the U.S. I speak to almost all of my rideshare drivers about how they feel about their work. Literally none of them have expressed the feeling that they're trapped. (And not one has said that he would prefer driving a taxi.) They do make criticisms, more of Uber than of Lyft. But the main sentiments that they express are appreciation of scheduling flexibility and of not having a boss.
Comment by ClumsyPilot - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32048240
There are a lot of articles from random websites saying that it is a good deal, and given the ease of placing such content I think we should be skeptical. Every time I see an article from a driver, who is not a pro blogger in the space, and who’s done the math, it is usually pretty negative to neutral.
https://www.quora.com/Is-driving-for-Uber-worth-the-wear-and...
It’s actually really hard to know if you’re making money when you take things like capital depreciation and opportunity cost into account, and sophisticated businesspeople make this mistake all the time. The average driver could easily be fooled until it’s too late.
It would be nice if capitalism did correct price discovery here but we’re dealing with a market which has been highly distorted, both from questionable government regulation and taxi monopolies AND from insane startup valuations and investment. The only accountability moment has been the public markets and even then it’s pretty mixed.
Uber has overwhelming power over their drivers and if it was actually a good deal for them it would be the first time in the history of labor relations that a company left money on the table out of the goodness of their heart. Does Uber strike you as that company?
Yes I use ridesharing when I’m in the SFBA because there’s few other plausible ways to get around. I’m crossing my fingers the whole time that I’m not helping someone dig themselves deeper into a financial hole.
“The poor dumb blue collar workers don’t know any better and need to be protected by the smarter elites who did the calculations!”
There was a study by MIT in 2018 that concluded it was a bad deal for drivers. https://techcrunch.com/2018/03/02/mit-study-shows-how-much-d...
I don’t know if the 2018 data is still relevant, as there are complex incentives that vary in each market.
But, Uber (and similar companies) could probably end the questions tomorrow by releasing data or allowing researchers to have access to their drivers. The fact that they don’t, and that they instead spend $200M lobbying the governments to make an exception for worker protections for rideshare drivers (and tried to make that irrevocable without a 7/8ths majority!!) seems telling to me.
https://amp.cnn.com/cnn/2021/08/20/politics/california-propo...
If you're going to just dismiss someone's point through an appeal to sentiment, you might as well get it right. Or maybe getting what was said right doesn't matter, and just recasting it as elitist as a tactic is the point.
Please don't make up phony exaggerations just to win an Internet argument.
I’m addicted to marijuana, but I still think it’s a good thing because it helps my PTSD. I don’t like being addicted to it, but I’m better off consuming it than not, although my addiction makes it difficult to regulate.
I don’t think it’s a career. Just a job. If my kid drove for a ride share while going to school or something that seems fine.
If you were to ask me that question, I'd say: I'd be as happy that my child drives for Uber, as much as I'd be happy they're driving for a taxi, limousine, or a bus.
2. I never stated I'd feel shameful
3. I'm not sure I understand what argument you're trying to make
Just think about the subjective bias here. They're working, you're the customer - do you talk shit about your employer on company time? Everyone knows that has serious risks.
Whether they represent a majority of Uber drivers or just a noisy minority is more difficult.
If you are working at a dead end job, where your pays and benefits are sub-optimal, and you are even putting more work hours then in other possible jobs, then why are you working there? Because of cognitive dissonance it is much easier to tell your self that you actually like the job over accepting the reality that you probably shouldn’t work there.
https://dilbert.com/strip/1992-08-09
if you ask a smoking addinct if they could quit, 80% say yes and 80% will fail if they try.
Now if you show they've done the math on depreciation of their car, worked for 10 years, etc. then maybe yoi have an argument
Uber didn't replace taxi. taxi was dying on it's own. Uber actually kept the bad designs of taxi going but they monopolized the Medallions.
"what it replaced" was the ongoing outcry to minimally decent public transit. Some of the international offshoots of the Occupy movement actually had this as their central theme.
A sociology professor I had assigned us a project to do something that would be "considered abnormal to the general public", and then document the results. He had mentioned over and over again to try and implement "as many safety measures as possible during planning". The professor went on to explain that the reason for harping on safety was such a big deal because a student of a previous class (decades before ridesharing) decided that their project would be to bring their personnel vehicle to where cabbies would line up. The student would instead offer rides to customers completely for free. I believe they even had a little sign they put on their window.
After this occurred two or three times, all of the cabbies completely boxed the students car in and called for the police to come. If I recall correctly, they were yelling, screaming, and honking at the student about how they were taking money out of their pockets. Some were accusing the student of taking customers to an undisclosed location and robbing them in order to get paid, while others were saying that doing this for free was essentially stealing from the cabbies, since the student didn't have a taxi permit.
I'm not sure if this was a matter of corruption as much as it was messing with/hurting people trying to make a living, but, I did think it was interesting that all of these different cabbies, from all of these rival taxi companies were all willing to work together spur of the moment, to stop someone who they couldn't possibly compete with. As I understand it, the depths of the rivalry between some of these companies ran pretty deep; it was shocking how willingly they all were to join up to crush this outside threat.
Uber is the worst kind of business preying on the lower class claiming independence and freedom when it's the opposite and you are basically a working slave. It did everything possible to go around government worker protections.
[1] https://www.20min.ch/story/uber-soll-fahrern-eine-halbe-mill...
In Europe, uber is exploiting the most vulnerable in our societies, and profiting of the harm they do to people and communities.
Not to mention, breaking laws, endangering passengers, using outright evil methods to keep their workers money.
I also get a lot of happy drivers saying "this is my first day / week".
I see a lot of crazy driving too. All in all, it seems like there is a learning curve to being a profitable Uber driver. It is not necessarily easy to accomplish.
The ones who seem to anecdotally do best by it are the folks supplementing income by opportunistically taking fares here and there.
If so, why?
This all seems to come down to the rates of pay available to drivers getting worse, presumably as the VC money runs out. Thankfully the old cab firms have managed to cling on in the face of years of massive market distortion, and are still there to pick up the slack.
I'm really not fine with that.
These are just two examples from one market.
That's a large part of Uber's success: they are able to leverage the many people who have a car and occasionally have nothing better to do. There are even people who will drive for fun or as a way to kill boredom. Of course, those people will happily take a fraction of the pay that a professional taxi driver would. And those rides will be cheaper for consumers compared to taxi rides.
It's of course a problem when regulators disallow them to leverage this large class of drivers. When they are forced to operate like a taxi operator, a big part of their value proposition is gone. This is bad for consumers and Uber, but good for taxi operators.
It's only good for customers when they need to get a ride for certain times and only for some time. One of the reasons why taxis get regulated is because taxi companies need to guarantee service throughout the day. Drivers who only drive on the side will not provide that service, moreover if the regular taxi drivers are driven into bankruptcy because of uber drivers taking all the profitable times prices on average actually go up and especially for off peak times.
Uber's biggest lie is that these are the only stakeholders in the equation.
At the median rate for my city (Boston), those drivers were paid $1.07/mile* or $214K. They probably paid under $50K in gas, oil, tires, and repairs to that point, so they’re quite a bit ahead even if they have to throw the car away. Even at $0.66/mile for some of the worse cities, that’s still $132K in gross income.
* https://www.stilt.com/blog/2020/02/how-much-does-uber-pay/
You make the assumption that they are driving ~3800 miles a week and I can tell you, as a truck driver who is mostly out on the highways, there’s no way in hell they are doing those kinds of miles city driving. That’s like 550 miles a day seven days a week.
When I drove a cab the lowest rate was $1.45/mile (for medical vouchers) and some days it cost me money to haul people around and my expenses were only like $140/day (gas + lease). Though, once in a while I’d have a really good day with some big cash calls and take home a few hundred bucks but mostly I averaged ~$100/day take home (before taxes which I didn’t actually pay). Mostly, depending on the season and what was happening in town.
Uber is only a good company if it improves, yet somehow there is a never ending online narrative that "It's treating me well, so it's great for the world!".
That's not normal, it's deception.
At the peak these licenses were going for a million dollars each.
I think Uber, Lyft, and others are serving a great good in substituting for taxis in filling the need for road travelers. Taxi drivers may argue that the drivers are being abused, but we can't all have (nor do we all want) jobs with lots of protections.
Being a driver should be a job anyone could take while on the road to reaching their dreams in life, and not restricted to a lucky few who demanded the government give them a monopoly on the gig.
Previously you'd get into taxi and then tell address. And refusing not-profitable-enough service was illegal. Now drivers see the route beforehand and can skip it.
A job should allow people to make a good wage and make a living out of it. It shouldn't be race-to-the-bottom for the profit of few by sacrificing quality of service.
The existing cartel wasn't fair. Having Uber open the door has allowed smaller players into a closed market. The taxi industry is still healthy and slightly more modern because of this.
The law in question being simply that they cannot compete at all.
>does not pay local taxes
They pay all sorts of taxes in my jurisdiction from day one, and still kicked the taxi industry's ass.
Selling a good at a loss in order to jack up the price later (the desired Uber play, though it seems like it's backfiring) used to be called "dumping", but...eh.
I remember having to plan around the expected number of cabs that wouldn't bother to show up after quoting "10 mins" to get to SFO. Or having a London cabbie decide that my being sat in his cab was a license to spout pro-Brexit nonsense for 15 minutes and then claim that he didn't take credit cards. Or NYC cab drivers blatantly flouting the law by purposely ignoring you if you had a suitcase, because they didn't feel like taking a fixed fare in traffic to JFK.
No.
That is indeed how much Uber cost when it first came out. Particularly because they sent out nicer luxury cars and had to hire limo drivers. Uber used to be called UberCab, but the medallion cartel didn't let new entries in so easily and forced the change from UberCab -> Uber, and also made it so they had to use luxury limo drivers. Still, users chose and taxis died, rightly so.
The unit economics are there that whatever Taxis charged Uber should be able to charge the same or less. If anything Uber et al are removing overheads not adding to them. The only way taxis would be cheaper would be if they were dodging taxes with their "no credit cards" policies.
Bingo.
I remember when Uber first came to my city and it was free for passengers.
I think you're in the minority. And remember that the subsidies went both ways - one reason Uber was able to attract so many drivers initially (and thus provide great service) is that they paid them more than driving a cab would.
In formerly-medallion markets, surplus value collection shifted from medallion rent seekers to VC and private equity rent seekers. In non-medallion markets, existing normally run companies had VCs price-dump an unbeatable competitor into their market. Software engineers (and what inherent "good" is there to "software engineers," anyway??) are also in the middle, albeit with more of an ownership stake thanks to RSUs.
It's just the same as any other precarious job
Jobs don’t exist in a vacuum. When a job is created sometimes it spurs other jobs, but sometimes it removes them. It is a really dynamic system full of feedbacks and feed forwards.
I think I read somewhere where someone actually modeled the dynamics behind uber eats, and found out that it resulted in net-negative jobs... That is every worker for uber-eats meant that more then one other worker didn’t get a job, not to mention the worse condition of that one worker that actually had the job.
(If you’re wondering how I am rebutting runarberg when neither he nor I cited a source, that’s a darn good question. But let the record show I offer just as much evidence as he.)
* Food vendors that previously had delivery downsizing their own delivery staff and offloading it to uber eats.
* Restaurants not wanting to pay the service fees to uber eats gets fewer customers from the lowered exposures (as customers start ordering mostly through the delivery app), and eventually shut down.
* Restaurants that previously didn’t do delivery getting less money per customer as the delivery services take their share. And is forced to cut down on their opening hours and some of their staff to make up for the loss.
I never read that article you are referring to—if it even exits. The point was that labor dynamics are more complicated then: If a job is created, someone will work that job.
If we transfer over to the taxi market. There are examples of city government using Uber as an excuse to cut bus lines. Some bus drivers hence lost their jobs, and some companies probably lost their workers as the commute became to hard.
Also: how is “restaurant has no customers and has to close” Ubers fault? I guess restaurants never closed before Uber eats existed, or is Uber to blame for those business failures as well?
There’s plenty to criticize Uber for but blaming them for the closure of a restaurant that can’t attract customers is simply ridiculous and makes clear some people simply in this thread will blame anything on Uber regardless of whether the accusation even makes sense.
> I think I read somewhere where someone actually modeled the dynamics
I know I’m being a little dishonest here. The fact is that I merely think I remember someone else talking about someone else doing such a thing. I never actually had the source, and I think I once saw a secondary source. But I didn’t think I actually needed—nor did I feel like wasting my time—to search for it. I figured it would be sufficient to demonstrate that such dynamics can theoretically exist.
Unless the union is able to explicitly explain their claim the Uber is somehow unfair to drivers, to me sounds like the union is just complaining they not getting their member dues.
Possible I missed something, so here are my sources:
How much Uber drivers make in Switzerland
https://www.swissinfo.ch/eng/ride-sharing-app-_uber-reaches-...
Taxi Driver Average Salary in Switzerland
http://www.salaryexplorer.com/salary-survey.php?loc=210&loct...
Unia has successfully sued Uber at the highest courts and Uber recently lost. Geneva has banned Uber and others are expected to follow. There will now be an attempt to recover almost a Billion USD that is owed to drivers from Uber. [1]
[1] https://www.unia.ch/de/aktuell/aktuell/artikel/a/19138
Yep. And also from the state/taxpayers, as the state will have to spend money to ensure those workers aren't left out in the street when older.
And children chose to work in the coal mines and die of blacklung
> pensions and Social Security aren't shields against elder poverty befalling spendthrifts. They're merely buffers
By that logic a literal shield is not a shield against swords and arrows, they are merely buffers of stronger material that protects you.
They come at the opportunity cost of being able to use the money to hire more soldiers or bribe your enemy.
Are you saying the average Uber driver has no more ability to make decisions for themselves than the average child? Uber drivers cannot consent? I reckon they must also be prevented from buying cigarettes and having sex? This is absurd. An adult entering into a voluntary contract is profoundly different than a child being forced into work, in fact it's the main thing that it means to be an adult. What sort of weird infantilization does this line of logic even come from?
Ah, okay, let's deal with adults: can you volunterilly sell your organs, sell yourself into indentured servitude, or into prostitution? Can you buy heroin or uranium? Can you at least open a coalmine without health and safety and let other people agree to work in it when they know they will get blacklung? No, you can't even buy some financial products without proving you are a sophisticated investor.
You are not allowed to do shit like that because when we allow business to profit out of misery and misfortune of others, business will purposefully trap unfortunate and vulnerable. It isn't an adult vs another adult -> it's one man vs multi billion dollars of lobbying, marketing and legal department.
When I was in college I drove pizzas and Chinese delivery for $2 an hour plus tips. It was fine, and I was happy for the work, which was the best I could find part-time. I'd have been much happier if I could have driven for Uber, and I'd have missed rent payments far less often. Miss me with the "this should be illegal" stuff, it's a completely different thing than any of the other stuff you mentioned.
In fact I would rather have prostitution than people working at $2/hour.
Why do you think successfull business happens in UK/US/{Insert first world country} and not in Somalia?
It's the fact that we have law & order, educated population and infrastructure. These things cost more than $2 an hour to maintain. Now if you started your own business and end up making $2 an hour, thats one thing.
But when an international corporation systematically exploits our people by underpaying them, it's destroying local businesses who can't compete and routing taxes through panama, it's stealing from all of us.
That they would choose not to do business there at all, rather than pay people what they were entitled, is very telling of an operation that's in the business of exploiting people.
No, of course not. These people aren't arguing in good faith.
They also get some criticism.
and uber drivers own or rent their cars thus owning the means of production themselves
The app doesn’t transport people from point A to point B which is the whole point of using it in the first place. They also specifically argue against any claims they are anything more than an intermediary between the producers and consumers.
Google translate is your friend. Linking to local sources makes more sense than to link to some 2nd hand reporting in English media.
> Uber was neither banned, nor ordered to pay any money to government, union, or drivers. All the order did was state Uber & Uber Eats must treat drivers going forward as employees and Uber in response pulled out of the market.
Sounds to me like their business model was banned. Sure I guess pendantically that is not Über being banned, it still is the same outcome.
> As for the drivers, they were not forced to work for Uber and were aware of the impact.
The servs in 1800s russia also chose to work, so all is good?
> I personally do not agree with the ruling, since drivers were in control of when & where they worked and as such, they were not employees of Uber.
So what other companies did they work for? Also by your definition everyone who works from home (can choose where to work) and has flexible hours (chooses when to work) is not an employee?
> Thanks to the Union’s actions 1000s of people are out of work. Is the Union going to pay the Uber drivers the money they “stole” from them?
The Union did not break laws, Uber did
It seems you don't seem to believe in the rule of law.
I appreciate this post, thank you for the chuckle. It’s pretty rare to see somebody outright admit to being unwilling to use basic google functionality in the middle of a disagreement and request that the counterparty do the work for them.
They are effectively forced to work for Uber when the company eventually captures the market away from taxis, either due to subsiding rides and lowering prices vs taxi rides, or other offers that make them initially more attractive to riders than city taxis. After capturing said market by network effect you force more drivers to join because their customers are in the platform.
It's Uber's business model for expansion...
This is incredibly obnoxious. A) English language sources might not exist B) you can use Google etc translate so it's not up to the source provider to even find English language sources and C) you are assuming you are right.
There may be a disconnect here for those who are not Swiss. That very "idea" is arguably detrimental to the social health of a country like Switzerland (whose citizens appear to practice a sort of honor system when it comes to social norms and laws), while it may well be a non-issue in most other countries.
I think a global company like Uber will have a social impact, whether positive or negative, that very much reflects specific regions or nations, so white knighting Uber as a general proposition is not very sound.
In the netherlands for instance, uber and many others got slapped down hard for circumventing the law according to the literal implementation of the law, instead of taking into account the spirit of the law aswell.
You’re forgetting that one of these two person needs to pay for a car, car taxes, fuel and insurance by themself.
It seems that this ~billion USD is an hypothetical amount Uber would have had to pay if its contractors had been employees? If so, I'm not quite sure "steal" is the appropriate word here. It also ignores the many things Uber might have done differently if its drivers had been employees: increase fare rates, decrease driver payouts, hire less drivers, possibly get out of Switzerland entirely, etc.
As it was discussed in the other threads - Uber is not prohibited in Switzerland, they just need to adhere to the law same as everyone else. Somehow this seems to be a problem for them.
Sounds like Uber was the original web3 business
I'm sorry that the world doesn't offer magical fairyland jobs that are super easy, require zero skill, and pay super well, I really am - as a society we should be aiming for an abundance economy fueled by automation, where everyone shares in the spoils. But running a business that gives people work that they are generally happy to have the option to take is not infringement on anyone's independence or freedom. Just don't drive for them, and you'd be in the exact same position you were in without them existing (unless you were profiting from the heavily cartel-ized taxi system which abused all the customers, in which case I can't give a bigger shrug).
https://twitter.com/shrutisonal26/status/1544540603932758016
Edit: Apart from the tweets, the actual article is behind a paywall.
Meanwhile, visiting my parents in a smaller part of Ireland, getting a taxi involves phoning, waiting to see if they decide to pick up (if it's busy they don't), then having them tell you it'll be 10 minutes only to arrive after an hour, not accepting card, etc.
In Scandinavian countries it was even better.
Laws and regulation are supposed to reign in bad industry.
Brigading and PR spin is rampant with Uber online for some strange reason, when in truth, they could provide a far better service by relaxing their tendency to spin bad PR by paying and insuring drivers better, and by operating more like a legit Taxi business.
It is NOT Uber that swept in and fixed the corrupt transport for hire system... It was passengers choosing a less expensive (subsidized by company investment) service, which is now dramatically increasing in cost to users now that they have stable market dominance.
The online PR spins only hold up for people who don't properly recall the past and for those who are unaware of the deception involved in use of "folksy" individual personal tropes used to over-simplify complex issues.
Do they? I'm trying to find some data on how much market share Uber has vs Lyft vs taxis.
The minute it starts turning the screws to be profitable, the service quality will go back to what it replaced.
Here in India, its already less reliable and often more expensive than old school taxis.
Uber held drivers accountable. The taxi lobby did the exact opposite - they brutally abused an advantage gifted to them by the government because taxis are supposed to be a valuable public service.
In India it may be different, but in the US it continues to be extremely reliable.
This is a hint at the main thing we need to remember: Uber replaced a terrible taxi situation in San Francisco. Every city is not like San Francisco. Every country is not like the US. Based on various comments here from people outside the US, some places already had functioning taxi systems, with reasonable prices, clean cars, and good drivers. Why is it ok that Uber got to flaunt regulations in those places as well?
If you don't want to do that, option 2 is to chalk it up to the internet being wrong about everything and walk away. But please don't post unsubstantive/dismissive/swipey things. That just makes everything worse.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Ok, Uber in particular may be very badly run and incapable of turning a profit. But on most places they have competitors that are profitable and usually, cheaper.
Disruption can (and does) happen without resorting to breaking the law.
For some reason I would think the opposite was more common, i.e. if a company gets away with bad behavior, they will continue to do so until stopped by their government authorities.
Stopping on their own has to do with cost benefit analysis and is thus circumstantial. For a sort of in progress Amazon openly admits that they need to reduce turn over because they are running out of hiring pool. Their work conditions are still infamous but they set standards. That could ironically potentially mean a more competitive environment could have had worse wages. Not an arguement against it being a problem but an amusing irony.
Similarly deeper pockets mean a need to be less reckless as big payout judgements become collectable. If a fly by night roofing company has a worker fall and break their back from lack of safety equipment it may only have a few hundred thousand in assets total. If it is a state wide one they could be on the hook for millions.
Solidarity among workers offers us a tool to combat these companies, and force them to make changes that benefit us at the cost of their shareholders. The union should be able to lobby the government to enact and enforce sufficient safety laws such that a worker will never be changing the roof over night unless adequate safety standards are met. And if a company fails, a worker has the means to refuse the work, regardless of the size of the company.
With solidarity we simply don’t have to wait for these companies to stop on their own, because we can collectively force them to stop, bottom up.
You are posting an anecdote and non-substantiated accusations against an industry based on your area. And you are doing this under a news where they have evidence that their competitors are as corrupt as it gets, a company which has been accused in the past of violating labor rights, disregarding local laws, bribing officials, exploiting workers, etc. And your point is that their competitors in Australia are worse “because you say so”.
Nah, I’m not buying it. The fact that the Australian taxi industry is bad, does not excuse Uber’s conduct. In fact I don’t care what the state is in this industry regarding this conduct and I wish Uber all the worst.
My post is a very relevant warning (in my view) about allowing politicians to use the above stories as an excuse to close down an industry. They are looking for such an excuse. Be warned and call it out.
People have been complaining about Uber not because it is a ride share company that undercuts the traditional taxi cab companies, but because they exploit their workers, bribe their elected officials, brake their local laws, and use VC funding to undercut their competitions. For this they should be outlawed.
My post is a very relevant warning (in my view) about allowing politicians to use the above stories as an excuse to close down an industry. They are looking for such an excuse. Be warned and call it out.
Not really. It is not easy to paint existing systems with a wide brush. The situation in Germany is not the same as in Croatia which is not the same in India. I will always trust taxis in Mumbai and Berlin over Uber, whereas in a foreign location I will look for local options like Ola, Grab, FreeNow.
Uber did act as a catalyst for the incumbents to get off their butts, but it created another set of problems which are equally bad.
How does replacing one set of elite corruption with another set of elite corruption get to " i am thankful to Uber Lyft and all the other incumbents for managing to get their foot in"?? You are thankful to them? What are you on about?
If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
Why do you think the current state is "/past/ this corruption." It sounds like Uber spent a bunch of money to just "own the corruption for itself." On the whole, I don't believe it's an actual improvement.
You may like the state of the cars more, but the continued overt monopolization and the worse outcomes for labor are massively negative outcomes, even if you aren't in a position to be personally impacted by them.
Not in my experience at all. I can't count how many taxis I've taken, with hardly any problems ever.
> corrupt
They lacked anywhere near the resources to be as corrupt as Uber!
Oil and gas companies have been blatantly breaking laws for decades.
Volkswagen, along with a majority of car manufacturers have been cheating emissions testing for ages.
Big banks literally rigged LIBOR through intentionally lying about numbers and laughing and not a single executive is in jail.
They're just standing on the shoulders of evilCorpGiants?!
IIRC, Volkswagen were fined several billion, and a number of senior executives were charged.
This is not true and the devil is in the details. It's illegal to transfer "personal data" of EU residents. The definition of personal data under the GDPR is what US companies would consider PII or personally identifiable information and not all companies collect PII. In fact, I would argue most companies go out of there way to not store PII.
email address and ip is pii. So basically everything uses pii even if it is only for bot and ddos protection
>So basically everything uses pii even if it is only for bot and ddos protection
If I use Cloudflare for example, as DDoS mitigation, I am not storing PII, Cloudflare is and thus Cloudflare has to deal with the legalities of that.
The way to follow the rules is looking who is doing worst and take that as an upper bound?
You mostly need to outlaw all of it or someone will keep doing it. Going after smaller companies won't change anything
Prioritising limited enforcement resources based on harm minimisation.
And if something goes wrong use the tools from a democratic regime to change it. Even with its drawbacks democracies are the best system known to rule countries.
No expert but in New Relic you can select in which data center your data should be. In fact many websites of US newspapers are not accessible from the EU. Just recently I had to order a gadget through reship.com because I couldn't buy it directly...
But this isn't about Uber, this is about power and corporate personhood.
And even this I highly doubt anything will come out of it.
The only billions Uber has is in losses:
2022:
Uber lost $6 billion to start the year, but reports a rebound in ride-hailing and no issues with driver supply https://www.marketwatch.com/story/uber-posts-nearly-6-billio...
2021:
Uber is still losing a lot of money https://www.businessinsider.com/uber-still-losing-a-lot-of-m...
12 Years After It Was Founded, Uber Says It Might Finally Make a Profit https://www.fool.com/investing/2021/09/21/12-years-after-it-...
2020:
Uber lost $8.5 billion in 2019, but it thinks it can get profitable by the end of 2020 https://www.theverge.com/2020/2/6/21126965/uber-q4-earnings-...
2019:
Uber lost over $5 billion in one quarter, but don’t worry, it gets worse https://www.theverge.com/2019/8/8/20793793/uber-5-billion-qu...
> In the weeks leading up to [his] resignation, Kalanick sold off approximately 90% of his shares in Uber, for a profit of about $2.5 billion.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Travis_Kalanick
Uber's CEO is still laughing their way to the bank.
F...ing up our economy is profitable.
Admittedly, Guardian is the only news site I check ever (last 5 or so years anyway), and even I am impressed that they went with a straight arrow. Good job.
// Weird seeing downvotes for my reply without any comments/input. Just goes to show - ignorance is bliss.
They can't be very smart, Joe Biden is the least corrupt president ever and has committed to total transparency: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-biden-briefing-idUSKB...
A pledge has the same value as good intentions.
> Warned that doing so risked putting Uber drivers at risk of attacks from “extreme right thugs” who had infiltrated the taxi protests and were “spoiling for a fight”, Kalanick appeared to urge his team to press ahead regardless. “I think it’s worth it,” he said. “Violence guarantee[s] success. And these guys must be resisted, no? Agreed that right place and time must be thought out.”
However, this is how all "unicorn" startups operate. Break the law until they get caught and pay a small fine. Uber will get away with this and people will continue to use Uber.
No it absolutely isn't.
Uber is uniquely corrupt. Their toxic tech-bro culture has been baked in from the start.
Businesses want to pretend they are people with rights, then they need to be punished. Send the whole C-suite and Board to fucking prison.
Uber is super corrupt but hardly unique.
If the law encourages people not to follow it the law isn't very effective.
Plus, the laws they broke are ones that almost no-one except taxi companies (and perhaps city tax officials) care about.
However, it's curious that there's no mention of Uber's largest backer, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, which put an unprecedented $3.5 billion into Uber (initially, that may not be all). All the article mentions is this:
> "From Moscow to Johannesburg, bankrolled with unprecedented venture capital funding, Uber heavily subsidised journeys, seducing drivers and passengers on to the app with incentives and pricing models that would not be sustainable."
https://www.thestreet.com/investing/how-much-of-uber-does-sa...
Uber's relationship with Saudi Arabia certainly deserves some mention:
> "In the interview with the digital news platform, Khosrowshahi said the 2019 murder of Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi shows that "the (Saudi) government said they made a mistake. It's a serious mistake, but we've made serious mistakes, too right?""
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/03/technology/uber-greyball-...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13785564
(Except that I agree neither with corporate personhood, nor the death penalty.)
Mine include:
Cabbie suggesting we pick up girl from bus stop on the way to club. we did and yes we had to pay the extra for his amusement.
Cabbie runs out of fuel. Gets help, gets to petrol station, wants to charge us extra for the time!
Ordering 2 taxis just in case. Anger ensues.
Cabbie looking on the floor for his phone while driving. Seemed stoned.
Doing a few hundred miles in a random cab because the whole train system was screwed up.