Uber, Lyft drivers strike in Los Angeles

Really, what you find objectionable is not the presence of Uber or Lyft, but the fact that people are running independent businesses, competing with each other.

That's a really interesting way of describing an artificial monopoly specifically designed to increase earnings for a specific group of rent-seeking, wealthy medallion owners.

It's sort of like describing the De Beers corporation as ensuring the world is not littered with relatively-abundant diamonds. I suppose it might be true, but it certainly is not the point of the arrangement.

You don't need be 500k in debt to get started for uber as you needed to get a yellow cab medallion

Once you made that decsion (to mortgage you house to get a yellow cab medallion), you are bound to that job as a serf.... Modern day serfdom, that's what the yellow cab medallion system became to the large cities.

the only way out, was bankruptcy, or hope another person will pay just as much for that medallion. Often local mafiosi types were entangled with the system, and you had to deal with them as well.

Please, lets not glorify the pervious system, as it was much worse.

We can work and make this new system better, and force the large corps to provide more (benefits wise), but returning to the old medallion system is two steps back.

capitalism, eventually: creating something g̶r̶e̶a̶t̶, s̶u̶s̶t̶a̶i̶n̶a̶b̶l̶e̶ a̶n̶d̶ t̶h̶a̶t̶ m̶a̶k̶e̶s̶ m̶o̶r̶e̶ t̶h̶a̶n̶ e̶n̶o̶u̶g̶h̶ m̶o̶n̶e̶y̶ b̶u̶t̶ d̶o̶e̶s̶n̶'t̶ e̶x̶p̶l̶o̶i̶t̶ for maximum profit.

I don't know that it sucks just as bad. If a medallion driver wanted to get out of the game he had to find a buyer. And often drivers considered their medallion their retirement naively thinking it could only go up in value. Then the city decides to emit 500 additional medallions and theirs stays on the market for years because if they match the city's price they'll lose money.

It went from super extreme suck to extreme suck.

Genuine question: have you ever lived in NYC?

With Uber it takes maybe 10 minutes max and the fare is 1/4 of the price of a traditional cab. Uber/Lyft have been a godsend compared to what was available before.

The cost of renting was often so high the car had to stay on the road for 24h a day for it to maybe make a profit.

Plenty bad things could be said. But I would probably be dead if not for the gig jobs.

My father drove a taxi before Uber/Lyft and that shit was way more exploitative. He was paid shit ($600/week was considered good), didn't get any flexibility (once you're on the clock, you're on the clock), he didn't get to choose his hours (they would assign times and fares by seniority, he mostly worked from the evening well into the night), he had to drive the company's disgusting cars that were constantly falling apart (which were also assigned by seniority and then he had to clean them, before and after his driving, usually because the previous driver left the car trashed), he had no recourse for shit customers that either wouldn't pay or would trash the car, and the taxi company gave zero shits about any of this because they had their medallions and that's all that mattered.

It was the worst job he ever had to subject himself to and this is a man that grew up in the Soviet Union (where he actually drove taxis part time to make extra money).

I'm sure it was nice if you were a taxi driver that happened to acquire your own medallion, got to work for yourself, providing dog shit service, and for rates of your choosing since the competition was artificially constrained. But that is a minority of the taxi drivers out there.

The average HN user - usually in the upper middle class - are certainly on the beneficial side of this. They've received a cheap private chauffeur service, albeit decentralized, that they use to a greater extent than they would ever use taxi because of its affordability (ofc made possible by VC money and offloading costs to the drivers). The self-interested confirmation bias in HN threads about the gig/ride taxi industry must be seen in that light.

I think you're assuming a zero-sum rule of the world where the only way Uber or Lyft can benefit is by taking away from their riders and drivers. That's not how any of this works.

Is Uber the perfect short? https://old.reddit.com/r/stocks/comments/br6hl1/is_uber_the_...

"Scab" is a hate term that has been used to justify violence against so-called scabs. Epithets for gays have served a similar purpose in the past and are now considered to say more about the speaker than the target.

Source: work there.

So I followed up. Ohh they said, it's actually get $XXX when you do 5 rides or whatever.

Fine, I did that. No payment.

Then they said it's actually $XXX if ... at that point I was just like peace out. This was ages ago so they may have cleaned up their act, but I was not impressed.

That would be fraud. I strongly doubt they're creating and cancelling fake rides.