So Bird was basically a constellation of small businesses, and all the people who were enthusiastically stealing from the 'faceless corporation' were really ripping off small businesspeople left and right. RIP all those poor people trying to be small-scale entrepreneurs.
One takeaway from the long-running US experiment with sky-high incarceration rates is that you can't imprison your way out of a crime problem. In spite of locking away so many people, there's a huge issue with criminality that's ingrained in many subcultures. It makes me think maybe China's social credit system might be more effective than what we have now.
I think the US has a lot of property crime. Japan doesn't have a social credit system but people there don't trash vending machines the way we do so they have a lot of them
It’s called culture. Every culture is different. It takes generations to shape culture.
A system such as a social credit system can have an impact on culture. But it’s not a prerequisite. Regardless of what methods you use to shape a culture, it takes lifetimes to build the good aspects.
China's social credit system was developed decades after they had already established much lower crime rates than the US, and seems at best tangentially related.
At the point that the social credit system was conceived (2000-ish?), China's crime rate was like 2-4x lower than the US's most recent lowest year.
What they did have back then was a population rapidly getting richer (or at least pulling astounding numbers of people out of poverty). In the US we saw major shift in like 1975-ish when wage growth basically stopped, even though productivity continued to go way up.
This is like calling Uber "a constellation of small businesses". Arguably worse, because Bird still owned "the means of production" (the scooters). At least with Uber you own the car. Did any of these "small businesses" get to make decisions about hours, pay, pricing, or scooter design? Doesn't seem so.
Edit: Reading the parent post again, it's crazy how "anti-freedom" it is. Accepting corporate framing of labor-law violations as fact in one paragraph, then advocating for a surveillance state in the next. Crazy stuff to see on "Hacker" News.
Sounds more like Bird was abusing the contractor laws to avoid having employees (and at the same time silently pushing normal business expenses onto them) like so many other "gig" startups have done.
Can you be more specific about which subcultures have ingrained criminality? It's better to have the courage of your convictions and just state outright which groups of people have a criminal nature.
Charitable reading: in the "some will rob you with a six-gun, and some with a fountain pen" senses, with a heavier emphasis on the latter, though the former is more readily punished.
> Can you be more specific about which subcultures have ingrained criminality? It's better to have the courage of your convictions and just state outright which groups of people have a criminal nature.
Not op, but…
1. Very low SES folks.
2. Very high SES folks.
Different types of crimes, different levels and types of enforcement/convictions, but seems to be true from my experience.
The absence of race in my two groups is intentional — SES is typically a better predictor of behavior than race.
Please clarify your recently self-invented TLA (three letter acronym) at least once in your response to reduce the cognitive load on your fellow reader.
Actually in this case the TLA would be more accurate as a TLA (two letter acronym) because Socioeconomic is just one word only...
> Please clarify your recently self-invented TLA (three letter acronym) at least once in your response to reduce the cognitive load on your fellow reader.
“Self-invented”… hilarious.
This is a relatively common term of art used in discussions of social science (e.g., psychology, political science, economics, etc.).
I probably could have clarified, but I think the meaning should be easily inferred from the context. Plus, it’s easily confirmed with a quick look up (two taps on my phone) or search.
Example of source that shows that it’s not something I just made up:
Exactly this. And not even all low SES folks, but particularly those with generational poverty are high risk.
Not passing judgment on that either, but I think the way to break that cycle is through high quality education combined with better security measures. The mental math is different for different people, when you believe that the risk of punishment for committing a crime is statistically low and the rewards are high (which will vary depending on your economic conditions). So make the rewards seem low by raising their economic conditions, and make the risk of punishment higher.
The business model was never economical. But Bird was able to bribe these contractors with large initial contracts to trick them into making unsustainable capital expenditures. Then when the funding dried up (after a "successful" exit) the contractors are stuck with equipment, staff, and leases while the tech company drops them.
If Bird was a "constellation of small businesses" those businesses could take their scooters to a competing network, or start their own local scooter share. Bird retained ownership of the scooters in what sounds like a very lop-sided and exploitative agreement.
More like a constellation of gig workers suckered into being franchisees required to lease their equipment from the company that owns the brand, with the terms of the lease being unilaterally changed by said company.
If you want to tackle the crime problem it starts at school --the educational system, parents, neighbors and strangers giving a hoot. Conformity in the form of social pressure is no longer there. Yes, we've always had small subsets who engaged in dishonorable activities, but they used to be a bit out of the public eye. Even in NYC in the 70s and 80s when there was high crime people at least knew they were doing wrong, they did not feel entitled to it. Sometime in the late 2010s it became noticeable that the taboo had been removed for a lot of people. Obviously there are many people for whom this behavior is till taboo. just not as many as before.
There is no reason we can't be like Japan --well, almost. It is harder to achieve in such a diverse population than in a less diverse population. Never the less, if we worked hard at it we could come somewhat close.
> It makes me think maybe China's social credit system might be more effective than what we have now.
This whole Bird situation is horrible. Plenty unfortunate people made an investment in becoming fleet managers. Some are now bankrupt.
This is bad. However, if they were in the Chinese social credit system, their lives would be ruined forever. This black stain would follow them around everywhere, for the remainder of their lives.
In the US there is a liberal bankruptcy system. It allows people who for various reasons failed at their venture to have a clean start after some time passes.
Bankruptcy sucks. It’s a major life-impacting event, even in the US. But you can recover from it. You can have a fresh start.
I see the appeal of a social credit system. The US has some diminished version of it. But it is not as absolute and draconian as China’s, and that is a feature that many people fail to appreciate.
It’s not that hard to appreciate though. Imagine yourself failing at your business venture. Really picture it. Don’t make excuses that “I would be smarter than that.” Just imagine a really unlucky situation. And now think about which system would you rather be in.
Another reminder that companies don't (and shouldn't) love you. It's a bad deal when you sign up for a "product" to be your job. You are making sure that no matter what the company above you makes money, while you MIGHT make money. The relationship needs to be the other way around. Risk needs to precede reward.
The Bird investors took massive risk, some invested at $2 billion valuation and pretty much lost it all when it dropped under 15 million, then the company filed for bankruptcy.
The fleet managers do not own the scooters, which is the most important capital. They lease some support vans, rent warehouse space and own some minimal capital, such as tools and a stock of spare parts. It's a low risk business with fairly predictable revenue streams, that's cheap to wind down when your main customer goes under.
And it's not a gig economy job, these fleet managers had set up businesses and employed other people. They certainly have no right to make money before Bird or at the expense of Bird's investors. It was simply a bad business and they made a wrong decision to pursue it.
Renting out scooters/bikes just seems like a very low-margin business.
There's just not enough money in there for the US techies level of grift they are accustomed to in working for near-monopoly behemoths like Apple/Google.
Especially in a non-zero interest rate environment, putting money into these companies is essentially financing the upper-middle-class lifestyle of tech workers. The only way this appeals to you as an investor is if you think you can sell this kind of business to a company like Softbank, while somehow hand-waving the huge inevitable losses.
Hindsight makes this easy to appreciate. Looking at it from the perspective of when these mobility companies started, there was a chance it could have worked.
I live in a typical US city with rain, four seasons, and lots of cars.
No one in my city thought this business model would work. The only reason it raised so much money is because VCs are idiots who don't understand how society works outside of California.
Speaking only for "micro mobility", it seems useful to distinguish allowing someone to travel within a city from between cities from between continents. Sure, it's mobility, but there are different kinds or degrees of mobility.
Agree, it seems to assume that the unit of mobility is something larger, like a car. When the fundamental unit of human mobility is just that, a human, since they are inherently mobile. We would do better to describe cars as macro mobility than scooters and bikes as micro. Pipe dream, I know.
In 2024 pretty much every country has a scooter rental service. (Including very northern countries with seasons much more pronounced than any in the U.S.)
Near Ithaca, NY we have a lot of rain and (usually) snow in the winter. I think a hardy person could commute on a bicycle much more than 80% of the time.
It rains a lot in the Netherlands and people ride bikes a lot anyway; I think it is not so cold, I hear it is unusual that it freezes enough for people to skate on their canals these days.
Northern European countries have people ride bikes all year long because they invest in keeping the infrastructure rideable.
In the U.S. the moment it snows the governments will send out a bunch of people and equipment to clear out the roads. In Northern European countries they will do the same for the bike lanes as well.
There's nothing interesting about the fact that everyone in a typical US city thinks some business model won't work. They always think that. You can't really get any useful information from that. Equivalent to a stopped clock.
I’ve always wondered why they didn’t absolutely plow VC money into lobbying for bike infrastructure across the US (or maybe they did and it wasn’t successful?) Forget app features, focus on the other half of the equation - the roads you expect your scooters to ride on.
My impression is that my fellow Americans are way too pessimistic about city improvements, and also that Bird did the world’s worst job of getting cities to meet them halfway.
Edit because I just thought of something else - if they were truly savvy, they would have made an industry consortium to lobby for shared infrastructure, to split the shared costs and increase their chances of getting favorable laws passed.
I also think most of these businesses are over engineered. These aren’t really tech businesses. Tech is just a conduit. You really don’t need that many engineers and data scientists and UX designers for a rental service.
The problem with these businesses is that they raise money as “tech businesses”, which gets them much higher valuations, but also makes them spend way more on engineers to justify that “tech” tag.
> Renting out scooters/bikes just seems like a very low-margin business
As are food delivery and taxi services, but VCs and sovereign wealth funds have sunk untold billions into them. Usually the pitch has some pipe dream angle like "self-driving robotaxis" that makes it sound more visionary than it is. I have no idea what Bird's equivalent was supposed to be.
This article is not about the bankruptcy. This is an article about the "gig economy" of the fleet manager sub contractors. This article was being researched prior to the bankruptcy announcement, which presumably upped their publication timetable since it was published the day after.
This difference of topic is also why you see such a different discussion in this thread.
I remember interviewing with Bird in 2019. Both interviewers were pleasant and great to talk to, but one part of our conversation stood out. They were both in LA, and I asked how Bird handled seasonality, like Chicago winters (I was in Chicago at the time.)
The answer was, “winter’s not that bad, I ride to work on a Bird sometimes in winter.” I’ll just say that it did not help with my fears about Bird’s business model.
Ive bought and owned a few Bird-like scooters and tried to roughly calculate how many rides per scooter they can get out of one and what they'd have to charge just to recoup costs. My estimates told me that from day one they would never be able to make money on a per-scooter basis.
If I had known they were public I would have shorted the stock.
> Participants had to start their own companies to get scooters from Bird, agreeing to make “equipment payments” that were taken out of their ride payouts each week until the scooters were paid off. After that, a fleet manager would be entitled to 81 percent of the net revenue from each ride, though contracts show the title of the scooter would always remain with Bird.
What's the net revenue (gross minus what)?
> If more than 10 percent of his fleet turns red, John can get chewed out by a Bird manager, and he has been told he could lose some scooters for breach of contract.
What are these contract "fleet managers" paying off, if Bird still owns the scooters, and if Bird can also take back whatever rights the fleet manager has been paying for?
> What are these contract "fleet managers" paying off, if Bird still owns the scooters, and if Bird can also take back whatever rights the fleet manager has been paying for?
The fleet manager stuff shows how this is little but a Silicon Valley scam.
Offload all the risks to others so you can show tremendous growth and exit at high valuations leaving the entire mess to be picked up by others, yet again.
There are bike share systems across the world doing very well. Growing steadily as per demand and run by a single company. They don’t need “private contractors” to cook up their books.
It’s just a completely awful state of affairs today where creating a new company basically means using technology to offload risk and costs onto “gig workers”.
There are real and genuine businesses that can be built. But no one wants to build a business. They want to build the next Uber ie, find ways around laws and worker protections to pad their pockets while pretending they are entrepreneurs.
Do some companies take the approach you mention? Sure. But for the most part your post is just complete hyperbole, straw manning literally every new business in the most extreme way possible.
I was surprised to learn that scooters can report when they have fallen over. Every time I encounter one blocking a sidewalk, I move it off the sidewalk and knock it over. I am pleased to know that this might show up as a metric when customers fail to park them courteously.
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[ 4.0 ms ] story [ 135 ms ] threadOne takeaway from the long-running US experiment with sky-high incarceration rates is that you can't imprison your way out of a crime problem. In spite of locking away so many people, there's a huge issue with criminality that's ingrained in many subcultures. It makes me think maybe China's social credit system might be more effective than what we have now.
https://arigatojapan.co.jp/japans-unique-vending-machine-cul...
on the other hand we got this bad boy
https://www.telephonecollectors.info/index.php/browse/docume...
which was almost indestructible. (Back in the roaring 90's I saw a black man tear one out of an exterior wall somewhere in the West 50's in NYC)
But there was that spate of recent sushi shop licking incidents. Not the same type of destruction, but related, I would assert.
A system such as a social credit system can have an impact on culture. But it’s not a prerequisite. Regardless of what methods you use to shape a culture, it takes lifetimes to build the good aspects.
At the point that the social credit system was conceived (2000-ish?), China's crime rate was like 2-4x lower than the US's most recent lowest year.
What they did have back then was a population rapidly getting richer (or at least pulling astounding numbers of people out of poverty). In the US we saw major shift in like 1975-ish when wage growth basically stopped, even though productivity continued to go way up.
Edit: Reading the parent post again, it's crazy how "anti-freedom" it is. Accepting corporate framing of labor-law violations as fact in one paragraph, then advocating for a surveillance state in the next. Crazy stuff to see on "Hacker" News.
Uber is or was happy to refer you to a partner that will lease or rent you a car.
Not op, but…
1. Very low SES folks.
2. Very high SES folks.
Different types of crimes, different levels and types of enforcement/convictions, but seems to be true from my experience.
The absence of race in my two groups is intentional — SES is typically a better predictor of behavior than race.
Please clarify your recently self-invented TLA (three letter acronym) at least once in your response to reduce the cognitive load on your fellow reader.
Actually in this case the TLA would be more accurate as a TLA (two letter acronym) because Socioeconomic is just one word only...
“Self-invented”… hilarious.
This is a relatively common term of art used in discussions of social science (e.g., psychology, political science, economics, etc.).
I probably could have clarified, but I think the meaning should be easily inferred from the context. Plus, it’s easily confirmed with a quick look up (two taps on my phone) or search.
Example of source that shows that it’s not something I just made up:
https://www.apa.org/pi/ses/resources/publications/education
Not passing judgment on that either, but I think the way to break that cycle is through high quality education combined with better security measures. The mental math is different for different people, when you believe that the risk of punishment for committing a crime is statistically low and the rewards are high (which will vary depending on your economic conditions). So make the rewards seem low by raising their economic conditions, and make the risk of punishment higher.
If Bird was a "constellation of small businesses" those businesses could take their scooters to a competing network, or start their own local scooter share. Bird retained ownership of the scooters in what sounds like a very lop-sided and exploitative agreement.
Or the reality of most participants in an MLM.
There is no reason we can't be like Japan --well, almost. It is harder to achieve in such a diverse population than in a less diverse population. Never the less, if we worked hard at it we could come somewhat close.
This whole Bird situation is horrible. Plenty unfortunate people made an investment in becoming fleet managers. Some are now bankrupt.
This is bad. However, if they were in the Chinese social credit system, their lives would be ruined forever. This black stain would follow them around everywhere, for the remainder of their lives.
In the US there is a liberal bankruptcy system. It allows people who for various reasons failed at their venture to have a clean start after some time passes.
Bankruptcy sucks. It’s a major life-impacting event, even in the US. But you can recover from it. You can have a fresh start.
I see the appeal of a social credit system. The US has some diminished version of it. But it is not as absolute and draconian as China’s, and that is a feature that many people fail to appreciate.
It’s not that hard to appreciate though. Imagine yourself failing at your business venture. Really picture it. Don’t make excuses that “I would be smarter than that.” Just imagine a really unlucky situation. And now think about which system would you rather be in.
Paraguay conclusively proved that yes, you can.
The fleet managers do not own the scooters, which is the most important capital. They lease some support vans, rent warehouse space and own some minimal capital, such as tools and a stock of spare parts. It's a low risk business with fairly predictable revenue streams, that's cheap to wind down when your main customer goes under.
And it's not a gig economy job, these fleet managers had set up businesses and employed other people. They certainly have no right to make money before Bird or at the expense of Bird's investors. It was simply a bad business and they made a wrong decision to pursue it.
There's just not enough money in there for the US techies level of grift they are accustomed to in working for near-monopoly behemoths like Apple/Google.
Especially in a non-zero interest rate environment, putting money into these companies is essentially financing the upper-middle-class lifestyle of tech workers. The only way this appeals to you as an investor is if you think you can sell this kind of business to a company like Softbank, while somehow hand-waving the huge inevitable losses.
And they will almost always be right because most companies fail.
Identifiying companies that will fail is not hard. Identifying those that will succeed on the other hand is very hard.
No one in my city thought this business model would work. The only reason it raised so much money is because VCs are idiots who don't understand how society works outside of California.
There are plenty of well-off places with mild climate where using a scooter all year around is feasible.
But do micro mobility companies have the scaling potential/dynamic of a Google or Facebook (which would justify the way they raise money)?
I don't think weather is the problem here.
Near Ithaca, NY we have a lot of rain and (usually) snow in the winter. I think a hardy person could commute on a bicycle much more than 80% of the time.
It rains a lot in the Netherlands and people ride bikes a lot anyway; I think it is not so cold, I hear it is unusual that it freezes enough for people to skate on their canals these days.
In the U.S. the moment it snows the governments will send out a bunch of people and equipment to clear out the roads. In Northern European countries they will do the same for the bike lanes as well.
The VC money forced Bird and others to unprofitably expand, which is why all those countries had scooter rentals.
My impression is that my fellow Americans are way too pessimistic about city improvements, and also that Bird did the world’s worst job of getting cities to meet them halfway.
Edit because I just thought of something else - if they were truly savvy, they would have made an industry consortium to lobby for shared infrastructure, to split the shared costs and increase their chances of getting favorable laws passed.
The problem with these businesses is that they raise money as “tech businesses”, which gets them much higher valuations, but also makes them spend way more on engineers to justify that “tech” tag.
They were very proud of some patterns that I found a bit ridiculous, not to mention expensive.
Direct competition because there's no barrier to entry and little locking/loyalty.
Indirect competition from ebikes, public transit, and purchasing scooters.
As are food delivery and taxi services, but VCs and sovereign wealth funds have sunk untold billions into them. Usually the pitch has some pipe dream angle like "self-driving robotaxis" that makes it sound more visionary than it is. I have no idea what Bird's equivalent was supposed to be.
Lots of discussion about the bankruptcy: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38706781
This difference of topic is also why you see such a different discussion in this thread.
The answer was, “winter’s not that bad, I ride to work on a Bird sometimes in winter.” I’ll just say that it did not help with my fears about Bird’s business model.
If I had known they were public I would have shorted the stock.
What's the net revenue (gross minus what)?
> If more than 10 percent of his fleet turns red, John can get chewed out by a Bird manager, and he has been told he could lose some scooters for breach of contract.
What are these contract "fleet managers" paying off, if Bird still owns the scooters, and if Bird can also take back whatever rights the fleet manager has been paying for?
This sounds like franchise fees with extra steps.
Offload all the risks to others so you can show tremendous growth and exit at high valuations leaving the entire mess to be picked up by others, yet again.
There are bike share systems across the world doing very well. Growing steadily as per demand and run by a single company. They don’t need “private contractors” to cook up their books.
It’s just a completely awful state of affairs today where creating a new company basically means using technology to offload risk and costs onto “gig workers”.
There are real and genuine businesses that can be built. But no one wants to build a business. They want to build the next Uber ie, find ways around laws and worker protections to pad their pockets while pretending they are entrepreneurs.