I used Pool last night in the city. Took me from the Fidi to Inner Richmond. $2.37. It was almost cheaper than Muni. I can't imagine the drivers are making much at all.
Later, someone pointed out to me that Lyft and Uber are aggressively competing right now. It seems that Uber might be artificially deflating its prices to try and kill the competition, or discourage new companies from even entering the market. If they do manage to kill Lyft, you can be sure they will raise their prices again.
Or take the Soviet Union itself. The democratically elected Provisional Government was overthrown by force. Even the socialists-only Constituent Assembly election was simply voided and ignored by the Bolsheviks when they overwhelmingly lost.
Your claim is empirically false. Socialism has historically been imposed involuntarily at gunpoint in almost all cases where it has achieved any measure of real power. Moreover, once established, its show elections are a farce, with only pre-selected Party approved candidates allowed to win.
You will no doubt reply that none of this was done by "real" socialists, and that <insert your favorite sub-sub-branch of socialism here> are the only "real" socialists. This is the "No True Scotsman fallacy".
Pretty much ANY political system gains power through bloodshed. The United States, Canada, England, France, Germany, pretty much the entirety of South America, Africa and Asia... With the wide ranges of political systems that span all these places, each and every one of them was put in place by violence.
You point out the horrible regimes that adopted the word "Socialist" or "People's" in their name and point out all the atrocities that they have committed. While adopting those monickers != actual socialism, you've headed off that argument, so I'll give you that. However, don't lay violence as a means of gripping power at the feet of Socialism... That's a human trait.
So were the US backed gorrillas in every violent uprising in South America in the 1980's.
So were Belgian trading companies in the Congo.
So were the French people during the Reign of Terror.
So were the Catholics during the all of the Inquisitions.
So were the Spanish during the expulsion of the Moors.
I could go on. The point being that this is not a Socialist trait. The first two were done with Capitalist intent. The last two were carried out with both political and religous power in mind. It's clear that you don't like Socialism, and that's fine... to each his own. But it's "disingenuous" to ignore history for the sake of proving your point.
No, given the evidence, it's not fair. You could say the exact same thing for Capitalism.
Please. Now you're just being purposefully insulting.
Trying to impute motives to an unreal analytic abstraction is the reification fallacy.[1]
That is an empty refutation...
Colonialism was(is?) as very real practice. I really don't understand how you can claim that it is an "intellectual abstraction"
You went to Wikipeda for the definition of reification, but not for the definition of Colonialism[1]?
They were universally created, armed, trained, and funded by the KGB as part of a massive decades-long social engineering program designed to make people think that there were organic third world socialist movements which had spontaneously emerged from the local population's great love of socialism. In reality they were all -- 100% of them -- created and operated by remote control from Moscow.
They served the interests of the Soviet Union exclusively. They were interested in the needs or betterment of local peoples only insofar as this also served to expand Soviet control and influence in those places.
As the local third world socialists usually naively did not realize this reality, the locals who actually worked and fought in the "indigenous" movements were internally referred to as "useful idiots" within the KGB.
Communism has always been an explicitly internationalist movement with the conversion of all countries worldwide -- and especially highly industrialized countries, above all the United States -- to Communist rule as the open goal. Under these circumstances, the US response of funding counter-operations abroad to counteract these KGB operations was appropriate.
See e.g. the Mitrokhin archive, https://www.foreignaffairs.com/reviews/capsule-review/2006-0..., etc.
You completely ignored (or didn't understand) my point. I spread the attributions of violence around to show that using abhorrent violence to grip power has nothing to do with political inclination, economic system or religion. It is innately human.
Whether other systems have also been undemocratic is irrelevant (the "tu quoque fallacy").
I simply making the point that gripping power through undemocratic means is not a trait of a particular political belief, but rather a trait of human kind in general. Not agreeing with huac, and not agreeing with you.
You're quoting fallacies while not understanding what's being said around you.
I wish people had the balls to stand behind their politics.
Now taxes, that's a different story.
If you're paying too little, you've got to expect that situation is not sustainable - either that good deal withers, or the vendor's lock on their customers means they can raise prices arbitrarily.
Quite the business model. I wonder if they really believe they're earning goodwill at the rate of an Andrew Jackson per ride?
At that point, any (future) new entrant to the market will face a steeper uphill battle than Lyft did. In the process, they may lose some customers to real cars or public transit, but they'll remain the only player in this space.
If Uber succeeds in killing Lyft, they can dictate pricing more effectively and harvest a surplus from the remaining consumers.
Crucially, Uber doesn't own the cars nor the drivers. Anyone willing to throw more cash to drivers and take less cash from riders (with the infusion of VC funding) can instantly steal both the supply and the demand from Uber.
They can do that, if they want anti-trust problems. I bet Uber wants Lyft to survive so they can have a substantially similar competitor to point to when the government's lawyers come knocking.
The problem for uber is that I am paying the majority of the cost of owning a car, the parking space, either way, so switching back to driving myself has a low cost. Housing situations I want that don't come with "free" parking are few and far between in my area.
Now if uber would bully the city into letting someone build a parking free tower of studio condos? Yeah o.k. Maybe they could exploit the lack of competition to get me to pay a lot more for transport, but as it is, they need to keep the price below what I would pay to read for twenty minutes rather than drive, and I am not sure that would add up to a market clearing wage without some vc largess.
If Uber gets big, expect this to happen in addition to blocking the construction of effective bike lanes.
Or they are just trying to tread water until they can remove drivers as a cost. If Uber can use VC money to pay current driver and then use more VC money to purchase a self driving fleet, they just have to wait it out until their current prices become profitable.
The only real benefit to public transit at this point is that it allows you to dodge the cost of parking your vehicle for a day while you are at work. But Uber has figured out other ways to successfully allow people to dodge that cost.
With Uber pool my commute takes roughly the same time as metro, is door to door, and now cheaper and in many ways safer than taking the metro.
That is indeed the case: http://www.seattletimes.com/business/technology/will-ride-ha...
An analogous example is Japanese salarymen working many dozens of hours of overtime per month, becoming dependent on those extra hours and extra pay, structuring their life based on this inflated amount. When the financial crisis hit and firms tightened up, reducing or outright barring overtime work, these families suffered.
Together, that would make your taxable income something like 60% of the figure.
[1] http://therideshareguy.com/what-to-make-of-the-2016-uber-hou...
[2] And seriously, phrasing the guarantee as before their own cut? Come on, guys.
If that "provided you accept certain amount of rides" keeps increasing since more people will make use of such subscriptions, the operating expenses (fuel + wear and tear) continues to increase.
Yes that's pretty disingenuous.
I see your point here and am annoyed by this tendency, but to be fair, in the US, this is pretty common. After all, salaries are reported pre-tax, despite a $100K salary meaning wildly different post-tax nets depending on where in the country you live.
Nothing wrong with a finder's fee. Lots wrong with promoting the pre-fee value.
I think your point is that it's common practice to not mention all kinds of add-ons when listing prices, so there's nothing particularly unusual about Uber doing it, even if we'd prefer everyone to agree to stop doing it.
But even so, I think there's a big difference: in the case of taxes (retail or labor), there's a valid defense: "I don't know tax rates in your municipality", "I don't know how many deductions you have or what your family income is". Even so, when paying a vendor, you know how much you're deducting from their payments for yourself, so you don't really have an excuse for reporting a figure that includes a part that you know you have to personally take out.
The scumminess would be more obvious if Uber e.g. claimed that rides in a certain interval would get a 10% bonus, without also mentioning that they increased their take to cover it all. It would no however, be scumy if they simply failed to mention that "oh, this might push you into a higher tax bracket".
Thing is, how many people does it take to run a medallion/dispatcher cab company? Aside from the drivers, maybe 10-20 people? An app-aided service could flourish with many fewer employees, so when you have Uberlikes trying to define a market they're doing so at a chosen price point. There's nothing that says that a sustainable price point can't be (much, much) lower. If a service can do 80% of Uber functionality/reliability/satisfaction, they might be able to easily undercut them on price and still have everybody be happy.
Anecdotally, I used Lyft/walked to work for a week and got a similar week of half off Pool rides in SF.
http://storage8.static.itmages.com/i/16/0824/h_1472075099_97...
I have been riding uber every day for the last few weeks after a skateboard crash. Pools from home->work are almost always ~$7.50 and pools from work->home are almost always ~$2.30. I believe it is because i work at an uber hot-spot and live in an uber dead-end.