A plague on uber and Airbnb. May they both rot.
Btw this is not just troll bait this is my honest opinion. I talk to taxi drivers and use taxi and these people got predated on for a thin profit outcome.
Also traveling around with Uber is a great experience (in countries that didn't ban it) - the service has been consistent across Europe and it's another thing I don't have to worry about when travelling - not having to navigate public transport or roads in a foreign country while also being relatively sure you're not getting ripped off by the local taxi service is amazing.
That's because they loose money with every ride? I mean it really can't be cheap to have your have your personal driver for your daily commute.
In my area (Eastern Europe) Uber matched the prices of other unofficial "taxi" services that existed for 40+ years. However, the convenience of having an app, not dealing with cash, ability to see your driver getting to meet you, etc. boosted the number of taxi riders tenfold.
Many other ridesharing companies are offering apps these days, too. So even when Uber goes bust, the industry won't revert back to cash payments and phone numbers. So like the grandparent said it's a net positive for consumers.
[1] https://s23.q4cdn.com/407969754/files/doc_financials/2019/sr... (slide 15)
Like even at current prices an average taxi ride is 2-3x cheaper than it would be 10 years ago when it was basically a government granted cartel. And you were at the mercy of the driver randomly quoting you whatever he though you would pay in a lot of situations. Uber brought a lot of consistency and availability to the market.
But regardless of whether they can pull it off, I’ve always viewed Uber as a wolf in sheep’s clothing. Sure, they’re pro-consumer now, but they absolutely intend to go anti-consumer the moment they’re given a chance.
The barrier of entry to what? Sure, the barrier of entry to autonomous cars without drivers is extremely high, but even if Uber is the only one in the market that possessed the technology, they wouldn't be able to drive market prices for taxis higher than the cost of a drive in a manned car. I don't know about you, but I have no real preference for driving in an unmanned car if the manned option is significantly cheaper.
It is a consumer win, I'd agree with that, but I'd argue that's not to do with cost. Same as Amazon.
Overall, Uber seems to have introduced healthy competition and taxi usage has changed from rare to commonplace.
And that's not even taking about the phone app and its capabilities, which were just out of reach of regular taxis (even the taxi companies that own a large fleet, these are still very small and have no tech capability). IMHO that's another front where the competition was healthy.
On the latter, I don’t know what would happen if they charged monopoly prices. I suspect you’re right, cabs might come back.
If you are from Manchester, UK and you live there, how often do you need a taxi app that works in Bangkok, or NY, or Oslo?
We could, for example, discover that getting the required accuracy outside of areas with specific characteristics is infeasibly hard to solve in general, let alone with the onboard computer.
We could have one or two horrific accidents fuel legal crackdowns that forbid driving AIs for a generation or more.
Self driving cars are coming, sure. But when?
Various regions have been profitable for years and the company has spent a lot on growth and marketing. It seems they're finding an optimal price that is sustainable but still much better than anything that we had before.
Another thing is: taxi innovation isn't either Uber or nothing. All these improvements Uber boasts about could have been achieved (many were achieved in some places) without tolerating illegal business practices by a thoroughly sociopathic international corporation. Maybe the progress would've been a bit slower, maybe there would be more competition on the market (which is usually considered a good thing). But it would be there, and done the way civilized people do things.
And before someone replies, "but MLK was also doing illegal things!" - which is a response I see surprisingly often in Uber threads - let me remind everyone, that MLK was engaging in civil disobedience to fight for the common people and a just cause. Uber is a for-profit company with long and documented history of antisocial behavior, and one which only cares about dominating their market by dumping any and all externalities onto the society at large.
The real question to me is do Uber's stockholders understand that they own the stock, or ar they indirectly holding them through some sort of pension -> managed fund -> ??? style chain where they are exposed to the madness without realising it.
As long as Uber's owners know who they are, it is on their heads if burning money turns out to be a bad idea. Not a problem for the rest of us, if we can be confident we don't own the company.
Assuming the government doesn't helpfully bail them out at some point.
This is the main reason why big companies are never allowed to fail. Why banks and all the traditional giant establishments continue to live. It's also why publicly listed companies that have been dividend paying for some time would rather layoff employees when growth prospects are scarce than to rather maintain them on payroll.
So if your company's stock is ever owned by government/pension funds, you'll have a pretty good argument for getting bailed out until you find your next trick.
That's just refusing to exercise personal responsibility. I'd hope an average consumer is capable of more than that.
People shouldn't assume the free market will somehow optimize for fair play, because it doesn't. The market quite directly optimizes for the things people (in aggregate) use to discriminate between purchase options; unless people vote with their wallets on the conduct of companies, you cannot expect the market to provide your conscience for you.
This, in combination with 'small government' and deregulation, is a recipe for a race-to-the-bottom disaster where everyone gets shafted (including the customer themselves) except the big corporations that run the whole show.
I think it has been sufficiently shown by now that making everything as cheap and abundant as possible, everything else be damned, is a net negative in the long term.
The supply chain flavor of that is playing right in front of us now.
Leaving behind what options for short-range travel? If Uber goes bust and in the process, they've killed off both their competition and traditional taxis, what options does that leave for short-range individual commuting where bikes and scooters aren't sensible?
I can't think of a single gig economy company that wasn't an ethical disaster.
http://writepay.blogspot.com/2020/03/the-textbroker-solution...
I don't think the gig economy has to be an ethical disaster. I'm aware a lot of gig platforms are awful in that regard, but I don't think it simply can't be done well just because it mostly hasn't been done well.
"Ninety percent of everything is crap."
> "Ninety percent of everything is crap."
I never seen that applied to ethics before. I so hope it's wrong...
We try a thing, it goes horribly sideways, people freak out over "ethics," which often means large scale, social consequences that weren't necessarily readily apparent before you did the thing.
But the cynical me wants to point out that any particular company doing gig economy/"share" economy/locust economy[0] business has to design and understand their own business model. Many of the ethical issues are already apparent at this stage; when you look at Cost Structure and Revenue Streams segments of your Business Model Canvas, take a stock of regulatory requirements affecting you, you can already what corners you cut and who's going to get a short end of your value proposition stick.
So e.g. I do not believe AirBnB was initially aware of the impact their business will have on the housing market, but I'm rather certain all the evil shenanigans Uber pulled were intentional.
EDIT: also: I know that I'm being an armchair ethicist here, that it's easy to see the larger picture from a high horse, especially when one doesn't need to use said businesses. But to my defense: doing that is a valid market signal on its own; to the extent I don't deal with businesses I consider ethically challenged, and discourage others from dealing with them, this sends a (however small) signal to the free market that those issues are something that matters to some customers, and are worth competing on.
--
[0] - I only now remembered this article, https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2013/04/03/the-locust-economy/. Worth pointing out that it was written in 2013, about when the "share economy" hype was at its peak, and everyone wanted to do a startup with this model.
I think the efficiency gains of the gig economy are real and can potentially benefit all parties. The fact that they often don't is something that I tend to "attribute to stupidity rather than malice" as the saying goes.
I'm really short of sleep and maybe that's the problem here, or part of it. I'm happy to discuss this with you, but I wasn't accusing you of anything at all.
I have thought a great deal about this and I run r/GigWorks because I feel strongly that gig work can be "the next industrial revolution."
When I was homeless and began doing gig work, I sometimes made like $1.25/hour, which is terrible. But it was more than I would have otherwise had and it allowed me to build towards something better and it made sense for me.
When I'm having a good a day, I can make more like $20/hour these days. The flexibility mattered to me and I continue to struggle to articulate the very real value of details like that.
We keep raising the bar and raising the bar until you have to have a PhD and be making a mint to have any hope of moving out of your parents basement, so to speak. And that's a problem.
I know you weren't accusing me of anything; it just occurred to me, while writing n-th comment in this thread, that what I write may be perceived as arrogant or pretentious, so I wanted to add a caveat about it. I know you actually depended on gig work, which is a perspective I lack.
Cheers.
The main problem with the gig/platform economy is that in a sense it's the worst of both worlds: those in favor of a laissez-faire economy will see that markets are regulated anyway (not by governments but by corporations); and those in favor of government regulation also lose.
That doesn’t mean that a company that’s genuinely based around providing consumers access to rarely distributed skills and products is necessarily bad. But it’s got to be the kind of service/product that the company couldn’t offer via traditional staffing methods.
AirBnB hosts are short-let landlords, same as any other operator of holiday lets.
Uber drivers are minicab drivers, same as any other minicab driver.
They like to pretend otherwise in an attempt to bypass laws designed for consumer and worker protection.
I don't believe this is true for Airbnb, both anecdotally and from Airbnb's own statement about NYC:
> "87 percent of Airbnb hosts in New York share only the home in which they live.”
https://skift.com/2014/02/13/airbnb-in-nyc-the-real-numbers-...
Notice that 2/3 of rentals are for entire apartments, the hosts that share their own home clearly can't do that very often.
> Most AirBnB hosts and Uber drivers are not just occasionally letting spare space in their homes
you replied:
> I don't believe this is true for Airbnb, both anecdotally and from Airbnb's own statement about NYC
and provided as evidence:
> "87 percent of Airbnb hosts in New York share only the home in which they live."
ric2b replied:
> That's misdirection. 87% of hosts, sure, but what percentage of rentals?
My reading is that ric2b's was implying that whilst 87% of _hosts_ might be sharing their own home, if you were to look at rentals then there would be a different picture, presumably on the basis that the other 13% are "sharing" multiple properties.
ric2b's accusation of misdirection was aimed at your 87% claim, because, whilst it was technically accurate (unlike what frobozz said), it "misdirects" from the more important picture, which is that, to quote frobozz opening sentiment:
> Calling it "sharing economy" is doublespeak.
That being the case for aforementioned reasons.
https://skift.com/2017/03/10/airbnbs-growth-is-being-driven-...
In the US as a whole, 64% were renting out an entire home unit. Obviously, some of those could be owner-occupiers letting their own home whilst on holiday themselves.
I have no trouble believing that Uber and AirBnB may have started out as facilitators of sharing. However, that is not what they have become.
I may be wrong in saying "most hosts". There is a potential long tail of thousands of not-very-active spare-room hosts. However, do such operators count much terms of numbers of stays and money spent?
B) I do not trust AirBnB to not lie or twist the numbers; they have an enormous incentive to do so
C) This does not align with my experience, having both rented and lived near units that were clearly taken off the market for purely short term rental.
Their 2015 NYC stats had several commercial hosts excluded, making it look as though they were still just a way to make a bit of pocket money from your spare room.
The latter I find odd because I can only imagine the impact on local renters, I also assume the ones that draw up the leases are the ones renting this our via airbnb. I bet everyone else has a no sublet clause.
It enabled me and my family to get around. Even if taxis had a consistent app across cities, the quality of the vehicle tends to be much lower and the drivers are not as kind. That may be just because Uber drivers can be reported much more easily than a taxi driver.
For smaller cities with a low taxi density, many Uber drivers treat it as an additional source of income to a primary job and I've had a lot of "stay-at-home" moms pick me up in Rochester NY. In NYC, I've noticed the opposite, with most Uber drivers treating it as a full-time job.
Lastly, without Uber, my wife and I would have had to purchase another vehicle. Thanks to Uber, sharing a single vehicle works great when we can't sync up start/end times for work (pre-quarantine).
Genuinely curious about this cycle of opinion on Hacker news. It's trendy to shit on these companies until it's not.
rides are cheap because Uber is doing actual dumping of taxi industry by operating on a loss. Uber drivers are earning very little + spending money on car maintenance etc. so basically only one benefit is cheap rides but even this is damaging overall system and is not sustainable.
so again.. where is that wealth creation (apart uber itself maybe)?
While I wish this were true, Uber is yet another tax dodging corporation like so many others: https://fortune.com/2015/10/22/uber-tax-shell/
But it's disingenuous to pretend there aren't any benefits for the US as the hundreds of thousands if not millions of people working in tech companies in the US for very high salaries can attest. Very high salaries both for the US and definitely for the rest of the world.
I think you are off by one or two orders of magnitude.
According to various sources the number of software developers in the US is around 3.3 million (https://dqydj.com/number-of-developers-in-america-and-per-st...). Even by a pessimistic estimate, let's say that 25% of these have very high salaries compared to the average or median wage in the US. Either because their seniority or because they work for big companies.
So that would mean something like 0.8 million.
Now, on top of that, add associated engineers working for tech companies, add middle managers (which are generally paid more than individual contributors), etc., and it's easily 1 million highly paid individuals.
Just think about it: Amazon, Microsoft, Google, Apple, Facebook, Cisco, Netflix, Oracle, IBM, Adobe, Uber, HP, Verizon, AT&T, Intuit, ServiceNow, VMWare, Salesforce, Workday, Dell, Intel, Qualcomm, Ebay, Paypal, Activision, and probably another 1000 companies with at least 1000 employees in the US, that I don't know. Plus non-tech companies that have huge tech departments, such as Walmart, and that pay salaries that are competitive with the ones paid by purely tech companies.
On top of that, American software devs have no idea how good they have it. In Europe getting 100k as a fresh grad is impossible even in Switzerland (Switzerland having much higher salaries than the rest of Europe), unless you work for... a US giant (FAANG). And those spots are a minuscule part of the tech world in Europe. And now imagine that Europe is better off than 95% of the rest of the world.
The idea of a regular Joe Developer having a decent shot of having made (made, not saved!) a million by the time they're 35 is frankly ludicrous for most of the rest of the world.
They’re neither slaves nor indentured servants nor necessarily any worse off or better off than your average Café worker. They make the choices they make in exchange for a paycheck, no different than you and I in that regard. The income they receive goes somewhere, and some of that goes to the government in the form of taxes, no different than your or I. Feel free to dig into the numbers yourself to figure out how much, but figure in that some of that is likely going into the car, which means auto shops and car dealers, some of that is going to coffee or tea, some of that is going to their rent, and some of that is going to the food they eat. All of which is eventually ending up in someone else’s paycheck as taxable income for which some will file a W2 and others will file a 1040 whether that’s tomorrow or 20 years from now.
Don't agree with that. It is a new model which have advantages and disadvantages. You would know if you are a foreigner in a remote town and want to get a Taxi. If the model is bad the market will correct it eventually. I think what's bad is the VC's funding or persuading founders to continue to run with loss making business models for cornering the market. These companies then pump huge marketing money without a profitability in near future. That destroys the local competition if any and skew the market towards them for a while. Sometimes it will work out but many times it would fail. Again time will correct the practice if it's not sustainable, we have to wait.
Also Airbnb and Uber have enabled lot of people earn livelihood without having to wait for trade union approvals for sharing taxi stands or getting hotel licences. If the model is sustainable it will go back to old models, but i feel it's gonna stay whether through Uber or other service(s).
>import money to America from the world
What about CocaCola, Pepsi, Amazon (and AWS) Google, Microsoft, Facebook, Nike and hundreds of other brands ?
However it is set up to extract rents from both consumers and drivers, which is a problem for the latter. In effect, it captures profits from transportation markets and sends them to a company in the US.
And that may be both sustainable, since its a platform market, and it may create suffering and poverty for many drivers.
Handily, the existence and further political support for traditional taxis implies that a regulatory approach on competitive misconduct is unlikely. So these companies may not only be economically stable, but even in terms of competition policy.
In any case, I hope you see the difference between companies selling a product, and those selling a platform, for a local economy.
The "model" of selling leaded gasoline took 90 years to correct. I'd venture to say that the market correcting itself after a lifetime is not what most people want.
Not that I care in this case, just pointing out a flaw in this logic.
I mean, it's such a common failure mode of free markets, it should IMO be taught to kids in schools. If a product/service has damaging side effects that aren't immediately apparent, or the damage is diffuse, or takes a long time to manifest, then the market is blind to those costs. A product that mitigates these side effects is usually more expensive. Such a safer alternative isn't competitive on the market and won't succeed until it becomes as cheap as the less safe one (or cheaper than it).
Conclusion being: don't expect the market to correct against profits on its own. In fact, it will resist correction, so for the change to happen, you need strong regulatory pressure and/or innovation aimed at making the correction more profitable. In reality, you need both.
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/leaded-gas-poison-...
There were reasons those approvals and licenses existed in the first place, as a lot of cities are learning right now. That said, shortcomings were also revealed.
> but i feel it's gonna stay whether through Uber or other service(s).
I don't mind the other services, in particular ones that can take what works and what doesn't, and do it like civilized people do - by working together with the cities to provide said benefits in a legally above-board framework, and without disastrous externalities.
As for Uber, may it rot in hell.
> What about CocaCola, Pepsi, Amazon (and AWS) Google, Microsoft, Facebook, Nike and hundreds of other brands ?
I don't think any of these brands ever claimed they're a poor upstart fighting the good fight against the Evil Taxi Mafia (whereas in reality, they were VC-backed international corporation, leveraging their deep purse to conquer market after market, extinguishing local competitors).
And then they pulled out the bonuses, practically forcing drivers to work 12+ hours/day (some even sleep in their cars) just to make minimum loan payments. No driver I've ever spoken to has been happy driving for Uber, but they do it because they have a car to pay off
Moreover, without Uber's (formerly) juicy carrot, they would never be in the market for a car in the first place
This is oversimplified to a painful degree.