Which makes your comment incredibly ironic, you know, because the underlying message is that a system driven only by individual perspectives is fatally flawed.
What if uber had been in his city and charged 4000$ for a ride to the airport? Does he live 60 miles from his airport? who the fuck knows?
The story isn't even a useful anecdote, it's a Rorschach test for libertarians to project their biases onto.
Then I would have dug car out of the snow and drove to the airport. I would not have been any worse off. The difference is that the LA Times wouldn't write a story about me.
What unrepresented party to this story do you think you belong to? People who are upset that uber isn't around to serve them? Again, this is entirely dependent on circumstances that you haven't made clear. Maybe Uber and their pro-market pricing think that you're in a region they can't make a profit in, and therefor will never be an option for you anyway.
Are you just in the class of people who are upset that taxis aren't available in bad weather in your area? Again, do you live up on the top of a mountain? Are you hard to get to? Again, it's not clear.
It just sounds like you're unhappy with your local taxis, and support unrestrained market policies, which frankly, isn't interesting or relevant to stories about Uber, their places in existing market places, and whether they're serving their customers well with surge pricing.
He's not trying to complain about his local companies, or anything like that, he's merely pointing out that this sort of pricing can be beneficial to some people, not just to Uber.
That doesn't mean it's the best system overall, it doesn't even mean this anecdote owner thinks it is, it's merely a discussion point.
I've realized that there are a lot of people in the technology industry who seem to be under the impression that capitalism is "out of our control" and that it also is somehow a system of ethics and morality.
This isn't my only outlet, of course, but this is ground zero for this disgusting and expanding movement of market fundamentalism.
I'm perfectly willing to trade some virtual karma for some real world karma.
Uber is not responsible for a lack of drivers in an emergency situation.
Uber can also not prevent competitors from entering the market, so the monopoly pricing fears make no sense.
Because that seems pretty hard to swallow given how much people crow about Uber disrupting markets.
Uber does help define the landscape of drivers and availability. There are other sorts of pricing models they could even follow. Why not charge a little bit more during off peak times, and then turn around and incentivize drivers using the subsidy from off-peak hours, rather than dumping it all on individuals traveling during points of tumult/crisis?
There are a lot of models between the awful medallion system many cities have and the way that Uber works right now. And frankly as much as i hate how taxis work in a lot of US cities, and as much as i love the user experience that Uber delivers, they certainly should not be immune to criticism, especially over issues like this.
Because someone else would start up with a pricing model of charging less during off-peak hours, providing no service whatsoever during weather situations, and the pricing model would fail.
It can be done at the government level - tax cab rides, then use the proceeds to subsidize those at other times, but it can't reasonably be done by one company unilaterally. The medallion system sort of does this, by fixing both price and supply. It's probably suboptimal, though.
The problem arises when Über and Lyft have their way and bring about an end to public transportation but refuse to have any outside regulation.
The article is about more than Uber, the article is about how a whole generation of tech entrepreneurs seem to have almost no understanding of why we have regulated markets in the first place.