Big tech has disrupted the social contract
basedfob.substack.com
basedfob.substack.com
Taxi cab medallions are a very poor example to cite. I'm empathetic to the story of terrible customer service and share sentiments about the overall erosion of user experience with many tech-adjacent, so-called disruptive services, but the second anyone suggests we were better off with the taxi cab than Uber or Lyft, they lose all credibility in my eyes. I think the biggest benefit that many fail to mention is that you can actually get rides when and where you need to. For example, people have far fewer excuses to drunk drive from bars in my hometown now than they did 15 years ago. I've had my skin saved by several rides that would be impossible without ride-sharing services.
In general I try to avoid giving any less than 5 stars for anything but a safety issue, because a low-4.x rating can get a driver deactivated. But stopping for gas and getting food? Nope, that's gonna get you a low rating.
The ranting about other customers thing is something I'm torn on. Everyone has a bad day sometimes, and that shouldn't affect their livelihood. But still...
The local law requires that the taxi must take credit card and/or debit cards. If the machine is broken, they can’t take customers till it’s fixed.
30% of the time they tell me that the machine is broken and they want cash. When I say I don’t have cash they offer to drive to the ATM so I can take out some cash, while still on the meter of course. When I asked them to turn off the meter to take me to the ATM, they say it’s illegal.
i’m a pretty pushy person and they give up but it is draining nonetheless
Now I get a car arriving in a predictable amount of time, at a pre-set price, paid outside the flow of the ride. If I have a problem with the driver or car I can report it with a low rating and a comment, and Uber and Lyft are notorious about deactivating drivers with even a rating in the low 4.x range. I can also give a lower or no tip if there's a problem, without feeling socially awkward about it.
Uber and Lyft are way better than taxis.
From idle chit chat with the drivers that used to drive for a traditional firm, many have told me they prefer it. They’re very keen on their ability to vet passengers first via ratings, and that people can’t hop out and run away without paying, which apparently is/was not uncommon on Friday and Saturday nights. As a passenger, I like that I can’t be fobbed off with “he’s just round the corner mate” for 30+ minutes and I don’t have to worry about getting cash.
It can be a mutually beneficial thing, it just can’t be an unregulated free-for-all which it sounds like many implementations are.
there are broad based wage gains and better prices for consumers when anyone is allowed to be a driver
There is more to a functioning society than the cost of goods and services.
Sensible limiting of service providers ensures that prices are not driven through the floor. Like setting minimum wage.
Also regulation could allow capping of the prices.
And there is nothing that says that such licenses must be transferable or sellable.
Uber or Lyft are more convenient for the customer, but the drivers are being abused by Uber or Lyft. Which is less than ideal.
That's the thing about BigTech: nobody says that the product was not more convenient (at least before enshittification), but the problem is that BigTech abuses their dominant position, over and over again.
Gross understatement!
1) You can find a cab wherever (almost) and whenever (24x7) - you don't have to hail a cab for minutes/hours (even worse was not knowing when/if the cab would even arrive).
2) Much safer. Emergency support + seeing the route on GPS (can see the path on the driver's uber app) + rating system.
3) Better behaviour, enforced by rating system. Yes, it's not perfect, but much much better than cabs. Cab drivers were regularly abusive, knowing there were no repurcussions. Unfortunately, humans only behave when there's consequences.
4) No scamming vulnerable un-informed people. Cabs were known for scamming foreigners or un-informed people. I can point out a few more things. Calling it `more convenient` is a massive understatement.
> but the drivers are being abused by Uber or Lyft. Which is less than ideal.
This can be fixed by regulation. Just because a new technology brought a new problem, that doesn't mean we should discard the technology and go to its worse predecessor. Remember : there is a reason the new technology took over its predecessor.
I think we can have both : the benefits of digital ride-share + good regulation for drivers to ensure they can maintain their livelihood.
PS : that's until driverless waymo/tesla take over everything...
Not in the US, who don't believe in regulations. But yeah, my point was that the best would be the convenience of those apps without the abuse. It seems possible outside the US, though: I believe Greece had banned Uber from the beginning on, and Taxis ended up building a similar app.
> that's until driverless waymo/tesla take over everything...
Oh right, it's the year of the fully autonomous car! Or was it last year? Or 2016?
Just because CEOs have been hyping this tech up to raise valuations doesn't mean it will never happen. They said the same about landing rockets - now, it's a regular thing.
It's pretty clear that driverless is coming - exact timeline is unclear. Whether in 3 years, 5 years, or a decade, but it's coming.
I still don't get this one. You don't have to sign a long-term contract to drive for these companies. They don't own you. If you try it and it sucks more than working somewhere else then stop doing it. Your leverage is your ability to say no. But if it's better than your other alternatives then why isn't the complaint about the alternatives which are somehow even worse?
People are always saying this and then you go to KBB. The average car is >12 years old, so let's suppose you're going to get rid of your Prius when it's 12 years old instead of allowing it to become older than average. Typical mileage at that age might be around 150,000 miles. Trade in value in good condition for a 12 year old Prius with 150,000 is ~$4300. Double the mileage to 300,000 miles, it drops to ~$2600. That's $1700 for an extra 150,000 miles, or around $0.01/mile.
$0.29/mile is from new or nearly-new cars which are then resold as nearly new. If you buy a new car and immediately roll the odometer past six digits its value is going to fall off a cliff. But if you start with a ten year old car which has already lost most of its value to depreciation, and then put a lot more miles on it over a couple more years -- which is what most of the people driving for Uber would actually be doing -- the cost is dramatically lower.
Presuming that the people choosing to do this as a profession can't figure this out is kind of patronizing, but, in the common case, not even that much of a difference.
Uber requires that your vehicle be less than 16 years old:
https://www.uber.com/us/en/drive/requirements/vehicle-requir...
Plenty of 10-16 year old vehicles are in good condition and will pass an inspection.
You can keep a vehicle in good condition indefinitely because vehicles are made of modular parts and parts can be replaced as they wear out. Whether this is worth doing depends on the expected frequency of future repairs, which in turn depends on the specific make and model (there's a reason the most common ride sharing car is a Prius), how well the car is maintained and how stupid you drive it, but most cars continue to be worth maintaining rather than scrapping until they're 20-25 years old. Which is why the average age of vehicles on the road is just over 12 years, implying that they last approximately twice that long.
Perhaps someone from Uber saw my comment and updated the requirements. If so, they must’ve been working on the weekend!
https://www.uber.com/ca/en/drive/requirements/vehicle-requir...
This is presumably some kind of regulatory requirement since it's jurisdiction specific. But even selling the car at 10 years old under similar conditions still causes the depreciation to be less than $0.02/mile.
On the other hand, that's around an extra $1000 over the life of the car, and who is to blame for that increase in costs on the driver? It's not as if 10 year old cars are meaningfully safer than 12 year old cars, nor would non-trivial numbers of people be using significantly older cars than that to begin with. Is this really just the Canadian government screwing the drivers for want of something to do?
People like you deserve to end up in a situation where they don't have a choice but to accept an abusive job. Just to learn empathy.
If A and B are both bad but B is worse, and then you prohibit A because A is bad, what result do you expect? B is still worse than A and B is now their only option.
This is the age distribution of Uber drivers:
https://www.statista.com/statistics/828981/ride-hailing-serv...
More than 70% are over the age of 50. Only 1.5% are 30 or under. Approximately 90% of Uber drivers are doing it part-time. These are not naive kids being taken advantage of, they're older people who want a little extra income and to get out of the house.
The people claiming that this is abuse are the people who want to sustain a taxi medallion cartel. Competition from bored retirees interferes with that, so they demonize it. This is how we get bad laws, regulatory capture and cost disease.
You help people by giving them new opportunities, not by taking existing opportunities away. Have some empathy.
By making them work for BigTech that takes makes them rely on tips because it takes most of their profits?
With regulations, you don't have to take opportunities away. You can just control the abuse.
Who is making them work there? Is there any place in the world where Uber is the only source of employment?
> With regulations, you don't have to take opportunities away. You can just control the abuse.
The incumbents define opportunities for competing drivers as abuse and then want to prohibit the competition from doing that. This is straightforwardly taking away those opportunities from others to benefit the incumbents.
If it was actually abuse, the people nevertheless choosing it as the best of their available alternatives would have to be in a position where all of their other alternatives are also abusive. This typically happens when there is some kind of serious monopolization or regulatory capture in the local economy. In that case you can forget about the original company for a minute and redirect all your efforts to addressing that, because then you're on a sinking ship and if you don't stop taking on water it's not going to matter how you position the deck chairs.
Whereas if there are non-abusive alternatives and people are willfully choosing the "abusive" one, something doesn't add up and you shouldn't assume that it's them rather than you who doesn't understand their situation.
But let's consider your proposal. The first question to ask about any proposed rule is, what are people going to do in response to it? If you limit how much they can take for providing a matching app, they'll add some other feature to their service and charge for that. Or just break out the existing charge on the customer's statement to list something else they're already providing. Your purpose wasn't to prohibit anyone from offering services other than matching to livery drivers and customers, right?
The next question to ask is, what problem are you trying to solve? Are their margins too high? Uber's net margin for 2024 was ~10%, and that was the first year it was even a positive number.
Now imagine they did not abuse the drivers... it would possibly be even better for the poorest segment!
"Things are bad where I am, and therefore it's OK for the tech bros to eviscerate an entire industry all around the planet, no matter what the local conditions were elsewhere."
Your experience is not the only experience. It does not justify what has been done. Your post only provides an yet another random angry anecdote, of which the internet is already flooded.
build an app that supports/enhances municipal cab systems, i.e. hailing, payment, licensing etc, breaking the monopolies of medallion aggregators etc
vs.
build an entirely different system without legislative safeguards that destroys the livelihoods of existing cabbies
Come to think of it, a similar phenomenon applies to cryptocurrencies: Even when they aren't an outright fraud, somebody has just thrown away the hard parts learned over centuries, quietly dropping them or trying to convince you that it's better to be entirely without.
You either need to prevent the apparatus from being captured by incumbents or you need to prevent it from being a central chokepoint that can be abused for oppression.
Definitely sounds like one vector, along with enshittification and other factors.
>*You either need to prevent the apparatus...or..."
That solution set kind of assumes that we must get to this point where those are the viable options. For me that begs the question, "what's underlying all of this that makes it so arriving here is the pattern?"
For example, questioning what we can do about such centralization and entrenched incumbencies in the first place; exploring whether some industries should be not-for-profit or public benefit, etc.
In general, the current system/economy presents a ton of inertia, frequently backed by network effects. I think we'll need to start looking at more creative/disruptive solutions for many of these issues.
It's a good point, and what you're really underscoring here gets to the heart of my comment—that is, the "creative/disruptive" solutions I referenced will require a re-think of everything, including the current "get investors who expect infinite returns" model. Likewise, expanding our thinking beyond wealthy donors being the only other alternative.
So, for instance, crowd-fundable or lower capex businesses may need to be prioritized. There are many other creative avenues waiting to be discovered.
Because, I agree that it's hard to see how you can keep all of these elements of the current model (and baseline assumptions) in place and expect a different outcome.
So, once you pull the thread of disruption, it'll unwind a lot more that needs to be addressed/solved. But, I believe it would be worth the pull.
Yes, if the only option you can imagine for building a business is to go the traditional investor/VC route, then this is probably true.
Kind of odd, though. You actually introduced the idea of "regular investors" being some sort of requirement, when the whole point is to re-imagine how we build businesses.
But, I suppose all new ideas—especially disruptive ones—appear as hand waving, given that most people are unable to imagine beyond the status quo.
That may be one of the most ironic series of words in Internet history.
https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/98215-every-great-cause-beg...
Remember the word "credit" is Latin for "I believe/trust".
I really don't get the hope of trusting individuals that are arguably being taken advantage of by a faceless tech business rather than trusting employees or contractors that are at least more invested in customer service for the company.
It makes about as much sense to me as distrusting humans so much that you want to put all your wealth in a glorified git repo coded by humans and run by a small number of people.
Either trust people or don't, its a pretty simple choice. Convincing ourselves that a layer of tech can abstract humans away so much that we don't need to trust anyone is just absurd.
> it sounds like you are less trustful of strangers, not more
Less trustful of strangers compared to what?
> i’m confused why you’re spinning it the opposite
What am I spinning the opposite? My point was that I don't trust the incentives behind the sharing economy and have no reason to expect better service than from the more service-focused businesses they're attempting to replace.
I very much expect that I just didn't explain myself well in the earlier comment. Sorry about that.
OP praises Enterprise, but I can't say I've ever had a delightful experience with them, or with any of the big car rental chains. Usually it involves a 20 minute wait in a line at an airport, followed by 10 minutes of someone typing into a computer for who knows what reason, followed by me wandering aimlessly in a parking lot looking for the correct car, which is always a surprise. There was also the time when I paid up front online for a car, and when I got there they wanted to give me an EV. I didn't want one, because I was pretty sure I was driving to a place with little to no charging infrastructure, and they ended up charging me more (surprise!) for an ICE car.
With Turo I always know exactly what I'm going to get, and it's easy to search for a car with specific attributes, like AWD or a roof rack. But yeah, you're also at the mercy of whoever random person owns the car, and it sounds like Turo's customer support is garbage when there's a problem.
Enterprise owns them but they definitely operate on a different tier of service. If your work has discount codes with them, they're definitely better than all the other rental agencies. (I travel for work and have rented from almost all the major brands)
Problem with Turo is that most credit card damage waivers don't work with Turo.
I think part of it is consolidation of the companies. Hertz now seems to be hertz plus dollar plus some other company. Hertz used to be cool (and more expensive, now it’s one of the cheapest).
It feels like it felt as the taxi companies were being killed by uber and later Lyft. Some external factor is causing them to fail and they’re floundering and clawing for every penny they can get.
I never heard of turo but may check it out for my next trip to the USA. But I think the real killer of the rental car companies is rideshare. It’s now usually cheaper for me to do two rides a day on rideshare than to rent a car for a week.
That's a big thing too. Whenever I have to rent a car, I go for the cheapest option, and that usually ends up being no lower than $60/day (plus taxes). If I only need it for a couple rides per day, that could very easily cost less. Plus I don't need to deal with gas, parking, or returning the car, worry about damaging the car, or ensure that I haven't had alcohol to drink before those trips.
That's the meat of the story.
It goes off the rails a bit with quotes like these, and mentions "Big Tech," but is really about the gig economy brokers.
> [tech billionaires] not only destroyed the financial system
Not really. Maybe he lumped 2008 bankers in with tech, but Uber was the worst offender, and it disrupted a differently bad taxi medallion monopoly, not the "financial system."
> These corporations don’t pay taxes
Also not true. I'm sure some don't because they're not profitable, but you can't be not profitable forever.
They might pay taxes in some jurisdiction, but usually not in the UK.
The profit problem is actually that they can be not profitable for a really long time due to VC money. Long enough to put competitors out of business, for instance
I used to rent AirBnB, now I'm back to booking hotel rooms.
And that goes for pretty much any "gigging" or "sharing" economy service. The past year, I've only used a food delivery service once.
How? They don’t rent airport space they use existing lots. Hawaii airports are full all the time because Turo cars are parked in them waiting for passengers
Image all the car companies doing that.
Fuck Turo
I call you all out as sub-human, waste of a skin, unethical, money worshippers. Get a grip of yourselves before the pendulum swings back from the far right, and knocks you off your perch.
The government and the law exist to keep property from the majority. If you erode those systems for short term business gains, you will lose that protection. Your smart mouths and Ayn Rand books won't offer the slightest resistance when the majority kick in your door, and take their share. Meritocracy won't mean 'who had a rich dad and went to a fancy school' anymore. Meritocracy will be about who is strongest, the nerd or the mob of manual labourers. What a bunch of clowns.
For as much as Turo sucks, the fact that vehicles used in terrorist attacks were rented through them is somewhat irrelevant to the trust you should put into the service ; not much more than where they ate their breakfast before, slept that night, or what brand of clothing they were wearing. It seems that said terrorists didn't have a criminal background, and they could very well have rented them through Avis, Enterprise and whatnot. They could have purchased Teslas, that would not have made Teslas a more terrorist-risk prone car than a Ford.
If you are going to do these things, you must go into it with both eyes open. Some people are not ethically qualified to run businesses, but they will still have tons of success in it because they stick to the raw standard of $$$ accumulated.
The broader standard for success (well rounded citizen) in society is more robust. Morality and ethics are part of it. Many parents don't talk to their kids, or their parents never talked to them, and the cycle continued. Many of these people can reach very very old ages as half a human.
Let's take the article's account as true and consider the "businessperson"/host he rented the car from. This isn't a matter of "there should be laws" here. The things they allegedly did are already illegal. Overstating the mileage on the vehicle is fraud etc. A person who does that is a criminal. Likewise the drivers who assault women.
The mistake is in looking to Turo or Uber to adjudicate this. They're not the police. Go to the actual police. What nonsense is this that we expect a tech company to replace the courts? That's the source of the problem. Let the app just be an app and if criminals use the app they face an actual judge.
It's seductive to want to align with the bravado of cut-throat businessmen. I was sucker for it too. It's such a cool archetype when you are impressionable, but then you grow up and realize humanity is about more than that.