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I think people take Uber because the price is known in advance. Taxis were considered the biggest theft profession of the world (excluding politicians) because they relied on extremely nasty techniques, such as threats, misconfiguring the counter, letting it run between clients, in Mexico abducting people as part of racket networks, using the wrong route, pretending there is a station charge and, last but not least, using law and local police against the customer. It’s sad that Uber has lower prices, because I would have liked to see a real match, I think everyone is happy to see taxis go bankrupt and another system with a reputation framework.

I hated taxis long before Uber showed up.

>Seems to me Uber has always been unsustainable (they're billions in the red, spending to capture market share) but they were hoping to have self driving cars to eliminate drivers by now.

I'm starting to think it is a rational strategy. Grow at a loss during a recession and make profits during the coming boom. Of course, the fact that they are still growing at a loss implies that we aren't out of the recession yet.