Why do you get to decide what a fair wage is, or what a positive force in the economy is?
Taxis are an obsolete service, Lyft and Uber are overwhelmingly favored by customers and businesses.
Taxis are an obsolete service, Lyft and Uber are overwhelmingly favored by customers and businesses.
This is like McDonald's paying workers $3 an hour, charging $2 for a value menu meal, and then people saying 'wow, McDonald's has made Burger King obsolete!'. Of course customers will prefer the cheaper service that screws workers and does not pay fairly, but (some) workers will work it because it's their only choice.
- A way to pre-pay
- A way to communicate current location and destination clearly to driver
- All from an intuitive app on your phone
I'm guessing you never went to NYC, tried in vain to find a taxi when you needed one, then got a taxi driver who barely spoke English, tried to communicate where to go, ended up paying way more than you intended?
Wait, so I get a comfortable ride, I get it fast, I get it cheap, somebody else pays for the majority of it, that somebody else has tons of their own money, not coming from my taxes, which they spend willingly on giving me a good cheap ride - and somehow this is a bad thing?
After competition dies out prices will skyrocket.
If I knew how to answer questions like that, you'd see me on TV giving interviews about my trillion-dollar hedge fund.
> After competition dies out prices will skyrocket.
I have yet to see a single scenario where this actually happened without being a product of government-granted monopoly (e.g. patents in pharma). But if Uber is going to charge me 3x for the same ride (just as taxis do now) I'll stop using them (just as I stopped using taxis). In the meantime, I've been saving money for a decade. I think it's a good deal.
I think we can all agree that taxis sucked before Uber/Lyft forced them to update. But that doesn't mean we can't have a better taxi experience using the tech stack Uber/Lyft created.
In terms of motivation a democratically elected leader motivated by the interests of their constituents is a better Stewart of the minimum wage than an un-elected boardroom whose primary motivation is investor value not the quality of life of the citizenry.
As a customer, I might favor the Uber/Lyft experience over a taxi, but I sure as hell don't favor the way that Uber/Lyft treat and pay their drivers. There's a difference.
And this in one of the most prosperous economies in the world.
Do you not understand that this is what you're arguing for?
Do you also not understand that if you don't already have a huge pile of fuck-you money as a buffer, your privileged steady middle class job will be next to be "disrupted" - likely by the end of the decade?
Because why would your employer's customers pay more than they feel like paying when they can the same service from an automation-aided gig economy developer who has been beaten down to the point where they're two weeks of savings away from being homeless?
We can afford to pay people, but the problem here is that it's not just me paying you a bit of money to cover your gas, insurance, mechanics, and time; it's also me paying for tens of thousands of employees and cloud datacenters and all the rest to connect me to you. That's a lot of overhead, and it's duplicated by virtue of multiple companies being in the mix doing the same thing.
Also, it was never really supposed to be a career - it was supposed to be something you could do on your way to work to help subsidize your own commute. Making a career out of a side job is certainly one's own choice, and I don't want to get in the way of that, but... are people getting benefits and guaranteed hours for busking, or being a living statue? Are people guaranteed a certain minimum pay for their lemonade stand?
Having a high overhead and not charging customers enough to recoup it sounds like a flawed business model to me.
>Also, it was never really supposed to be a career - it was supposed to be something you could do on your way to work to help subsidize your own commute. Making a career out of a side job is certainly one's own choice, and I don't want to get in the way of that, but... are people getting benefits and guaranteed hours for busking, or being a living statue? Are people guaranteed a certain minimum pay for their lemonade stand?
No, but they're also not told that they can make a living, get benefits, etc. for busking, being a living statue or running a lemonade stand. They understand from the outset that none of that will be happening. The difference here is that Uber/Lyft imply - if not state explicitly - to their drivers that it can be their sole source of income.
If it's supposed to be a method of subsidizing your own commute, shouldn't Uber/Lyft be restricting who drivers can pick up to only those customers who are heading in the same direction/on the same route that the driver has told the app they're going?
If it's supposed to be a method of subsidizing your own commute, why do Uber/Lyft assist car-less folk with obtaining rentals?
How do you think about taxis v.s. Lyft / Uber (which I would call "taxi services")?