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Comment by icelancer | Hacker News Reader

>> This is exactly what happened in other markets where Uber and Lyft left for various reasons.

This is exactly the opposite of what happened in Austin.

Well, they did get more alternatives, but a worse UX and more fragmented driver base that was smaller due to the added regulation meant that I just ended up driving more places myself. It became too expensive to take to go out drinking, so I just didn't go out as often. It became cheaper to park at the airport, and I didn't have to schedule a ride hours ahead, so I started doing that instead,

It turns out price/availability is pretty important, and adding regulation that hurts both often makes it hard to run the business at all.

It's like if a city demanded that all restaurants only served organic foods. It might be better in the abstract, but it's likely going to put a lot of places out of business and raise the costs of what's left over. Maybe that's ok, but it's not without cost.

I mean you could say this about any regulation and any sector. I'm sure a lot of businesses went out when we banned child labor, introduced weekends, the 40-hour week, etc.

We've always set a bar for a minimum societal contribution that companies need to be making. There's no indication that the current bar is anywhere close to perfect.

> There's no indication that the current bar is anywhere close to perfect.

There's no indication current bar isn't too high, tho

Given that the US performs middling to poorly on most statistics of welfare and simultaneously has the longest working hours in the OECD I think it's safe to say we could set the bar higher.

Given that per-capita GDP is higher in US than in most those countries (actually all of them except oil-propelled Norway), you can argue that the bar could be even lower

What use is per-capita GDP if it's not getting to workers through real wage growth?

Sure, and this is a balance that happens in every sector. I'm just pointing out that there's obviously a balancing act between what you can demand from companies in regulation, and what will push them far enough to make them nonviable.

Increasing cost doesn't necessarily mean that people will choose to pay it, or that it won't cause uncomfortable disruptions to lifestyle/planning. On the other side, there's plenty of services we want to exist that we regulate, but also subsidize because we think the value of them existing is high enough even if they're not financially viable at the cost we'd need them to be at.

Uber and Lyft aren’t profitable—their prices aren’t sustainable in the long run.

Uber Rides business is profitable (EBITDA=$742 million).

https://investor.uber.com/news-events/news/press-release-det...

No they are not. Uber deliberately plays games with Non-GAAP reporting ("look how profitable we are if you ignore pesky things like interest, depreciation, and stock compensation") and shuffles losses away from Rides (to Tech) to show a net profit when there is none. Any standard accounting look at their balance sheet shows them losing money.

That’s “adjusted” non GAAP EBITDA, or invented bullshit that they can manipulate nearly any way they like. It’s like wework’s “community EBITDA”.

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