Exactly how much do you expect someone to spend on a scooter daily? People can just buy their own scooter if Bird is forced to pay for all the real costs the Parent post described.
To get that with a bike share program, bike share companies likely need to accept that their bikes get used less than once a day, on average. That means that users must pay for more than one bicycle. That, in turn, would make ownership cheaper than bikeshare programs.
Where I live the scooters are mostly in very concentrated areas that few people would use them for commuting, either because they live in the suburbs (so far away it'd be impractical) or downtown (so close that you could walk nearly as fast as a scooter ride after accounting for sitting in rush hour traffic).
And just like car rentals for regular users ownership is much cheaper. Tourism or some other niche maker surely exists, but the overhead assuming they need to break even is huge.
(I’m not saying it’s for all, but for me, the shared scooter could not be replaced by having my own, which is the argument that kicked of this subthread)
Bike shares have comparable utility with vastly lower costs, and often can’t break even.
It sounds like the problem is that it's never where you need it. Unless you had 10x as many scooters as people and they were littered literally everywhere.