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Comment by dnautics | Hacker News Reader

I've been lyfting full time for 4 months now, I estimate my annualized income at around 45k, not 90k. It's still better than being a postdoc. (less hours, more gross pay)

Incidentally, at 4 months, I've already put on 30k miles, although ~25% of that is personal and of the remainder, 50% are profitable, 50% are not.

I drive a honda insight (35 mpg while lyfting) and including maintenance, I estimate operational costs to be around $0.30/mi, my average income floats between $1 and $1.5/mi. I also get a $0.55/mi federal tax income deduction, which means that about a third to a quarter of my income will not be taxable... I consider that to be a reward for having the foresight to purchase a hybrid years ago.

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In an additional benefit over being a postdoc, I set my own hours and don't wake up to an alarm, which I think has resulted in a marked improvement in mood and health. Although I work from 11pm-3am many nights out of the week, I get to sleep in every day.

The biggest challenge is that the hours when friends are likely to want to be social are also prime money earning hours, so I'm constantly assessing opportunity cost when choosing when to be social. And I've already taken one vacation, a week and a half, I thought making no money would be stressful, but it turned out to be less of a problem than not having my laptop (which got left behind in the TSA line). Like many things in life, it just takes careful planning and saving money beforehand.

I've been lyfting full time for 4 months now, I estimate my annualized income at around 45k, not 90k.

I work from 11pm-3am

Isn't that still part time? If you doubled your hours, you'd be making closer to 90k.

That presumes that they'd be able to get the same fare numbers during those additional 4 hours. I can see 11pm-3am being a fairly high-demand time. Not sure if there's an equivalent time slot with similar demand.

Rush hours maybe? Although there may be higher competition during those hours.

According to this NYC stats sheet (page 8), there's a sharp drop off after 12. 8 AM -> 11 PM is better most days. Although, who knows, maybe Lyft has some special pricing.

http://www.nyc.gov/html/tlc/downloads/pdf/2014_taxicab_fact_...

I work other hours too. On average 36-40 hours a week. Other hours are less lucrative.

Doesn't the lack of intellectual challenge in your work stress you? I don't think I could do such a mundane job and still feel fulfilled. (I mean that without an ounce of judgement—just remarking about the shift from academia / high education to "unskilled" labor)

It sounds like being a postdoc stressed him.

Being a PostDoc has its highlights, but mostly, it sucks, especially in life sciences, due to pathetic pay, unstructured hours and the suckiness is generally impossible to convey to someone who has never been one. Just 'cause it's research don't mean it's rainbows and ponies.

Source, I'm one.

The bottom 95% of lab work is pretty intellectually comparable to driving, navigating and possibly talking at the same time.

during my free time I've been playing around with julia, entered (and failed) at a bioinformatics contest (I have zero bioinformatics background), doing a bit of toddling around with ML, algorithmic trading, and I'm doing a lot of behind the scenes stuff on my nonprofit.

Shortly, I'm going to be filming a web series called "sciencerides", where I take rides with and interview science and math folk. Although I fully intend to interview grad students, postdocs and undergrads in addition to "more well know scientists", I've already got a commitment from Frank Tangherlini, who is a noted physicist and inventor of the "Tangherlini transforms" which are a take on the Lorentz transformations but presuming the speed of light might be anisotropic. I think it is likely, I will be able to interview Hamilton Smith, the discoverer of restriction enzymes, and Clyde Hutchison, inventor of site-directed mutagenesis. I'm also going to try to interview Kristen Baldwin, who is the first scientist to clone mice from adult neurons, Floyd Romesburg, who made the first organism that replicated with nonstandard DNA bases, and Douglas Prasher, who is the unsung hero of flourescent proteins.

Actually to me the most important interview that I'm going to do, however, is one that I have for sure lined up, which is by a mathematics teacher who has had impressive success teaching underprivileged, at-risk middle school students and completely turned around their performance in mathematics.

Very tangential, but why did your laptop got left behind at the TSA line? Did you just forget it or was it something to do with the TSA itself. Since I have to travel to the US soon, this makes me a bit nervous.

This may seem off-point but what the fuck is the opportunity cost of a post doc dropping research and doing a job a high school diploma can cover?

We don't need an uber to help us allocate car spaces efficiently - we need an app to help us allocate societies resources in sane ways.

Well, I'm doing this while the IRS is approving 501(c)(3) status for my research nonprofit (details in my profile). In the meantime, it's a good opportunity to improve "people skills" (although I was probably on the upper curve of that with respect to the pool of scientists to start off with). Finally, there are plenty of cross-promotional opportunities that I intend to explore (beyond just getting the fact that my nonprofit exists out there).

You're being awfully judgemental about what you think is sane. In my 11 odd years of being a scientist I have seen completely insane and wasteful use of taxpayer money left and right. I'm fairly sure that the median scientist (note the difference between median and average here) is not contributing positively to society. I'm not even certain that what I have done cumulatively has been a net positive.

And as a lyft driver, I am helping keep drunk people off the streets, so my median day, in which I drive around 10-20 drunk people home from drinking, has done society a favor.

Meanwhile, the IRS is taking their sweet time and not 'sanely' allocating their resources in approving my nonprofit. I sent in paperwork last May and they still haven't gotten back to me (average unprocessed application was submitted back in August of 2013), so if you want to give them a ring on behalf of me that would be swell.

This was not intended as an attack on you - you seem by all definitions to be a rational actor. I was I guess raising my hands to the sky and declaiming why our society (IRS included) is arranging the economics of your choices such that instead of getting an opportunity to make anti-cancer drugs one step closer to reality and available to the worlds poorest (presumably a benefit of the IP free nature) we get people who are rich enough to afford a night out, a smartphone, a cab and a home to be taken to.

So "we" (not you) have contrived a situation where we look after pissed marketing execs in the short term but block the potential chance of life saving, cheap pharma.

Like I said nothing against you or your choices, just that I see our society advancing only on scientific progress - a progress that is slow and uncertain, and all we really know about it is that the more scientists we have working away at the mines the more likely we are to trip over the lucky penicillin discovery.

So if we spend a considerable amount training you to be capable of the biochemistry and organisational skills needed for your charity and then fail to capitalise on that investment it shows something wrong in our accounting methods as a society.

Would love to hear more about the drugs / science involved

>You're being awfully judgemental about what you think is sane.

I don't think it's a slight; and I agree with the poster. There's a social cost to having someone with the intellectual capacity to obtain a PhD and participate in post-doctoral studies driving a taxi. In some sense, it's bizarre. But it isn't your fault, it's the perverse way that society has arranged economic incentives. Why are we not rewarding you for work that fewer people have the ability to do?

we need an app to help us allocate societies resources in sane ways

This is normally called a government, but the US has a big problem with anti-government and anti-science politicians.

This ^^

We have clashed on other threads PC but this comment is outstanding.

I thought you couldn't take the $0.55/mi expense if you're using your vehicle for hire?

I'd be surprised if that were the case. It's a legitimate business expense. The rules may be different if you don't own your own car, because the deduction is supposed to encompass both fuel costs and wear and tear on your car, which gets tricky if your employer owns the vehicle (as it would be for most taxi and livery services), but... I think THEY get to take the deduction.

Found it: http://www.irs.gov/uac/Car-and-Truck-Expense-Deduction-Remin...

"The standard mileage rate cannot be used if the taxpayer: Uses the car for hire (such as a taxi)."

So you can deduct your actual (itemized) expenses, pro-rated for business use, but you can't take the "standard deduction" of $0.55.

I am not an accountant or anyone qualified to give any advice, but this seems pretty clear!

Hm. Good to know. In any case, I've been keeping good records of both.

Sorry!

I also think it's a bad rule, because as a society we should be rewarding you for driving a fuel-efficient car, rather than effectively giving higher tax breaks per mile to those that drive less efficient cars.

I roll with the punches. Thanks for the info.

GP is being rewarded by saving on fuel-- his cost is only 30c/mile compared to the standard of 55c/mile.

He's trying to deduct both his actual costs and the standard cost, which is obviously double-deducting.

> He's trying to deduct both his actual costs and the standard cost, which is obviously double-deducting.

What? How do you get double deducting out of this? I only see a desire to deduct 55c/mile. If the actual costs are only 30c, that's not double deducting, that's just having a deduction that's larger than raw costs. Deductions that are larger than raw costs exist all over the place. The concept isn't strange even if this particular rule disallows it.

> GP is being rewarded by saving on fuel-- his cost is only 30c/mile compared to the standard of 55c/mile.

Except he paid higher up front for that fuel saving. And he pays higher taxes without that deduction.

So you're actually making less than that because you don't mention amortizing the purchase price of the car, right?

Well, I've owned the car for 3 years before lyfting, and it had 60k miles when I bought it; 90k miles when I started lyfting. The payments don't stop when you don't have a job, so THAT cost is a sunk cost, and with the miles already on the car I consider it to be basically valueless. Should I also subtract the rent that I pay for where I live? I would have moved in with my parents, temporarily anyways, (which is embarassing at my age) if not for lyft.

The cost is probably pretty low, but you still have to replace the car at some point.

Out of curiosity, have you considered also becoming an UberX driver?

I actually already am, but talking about that skews all sorts of reasonable estimates since they gave me a $1000 signing bonus and for a month are ensuring me $40/hr for certain working hours.

$40/hr?

Can you explain how uber pays better?

It's a temporary promotional scheme to recruit lyft drivers.

Which is better?

Can I ask if this is NYC?

If it is, and you throw in the cost of a medallion and the per trip fees, as I suspect Uber or Lyft will one day need to pay...that'd probably wipe out 100% of that income. [$2500/month + $.50/trip]

No, it's not NYC. It's in California, where TNCs have their own regulatory category. Moreover, a large part of the cost of medallions is having jurisdiction-approved-and-calibrated taximeters to ensure that the passenger isn't being stiffed. That's really not an issue with rideshares, since everything is tracked by GPS and there is a pretty straightforward way of challenging an unfair charge. Moreover, as Uber and Lyft increase their marketshare and revenues, their ability to exercise political leverage on bigger jurisdictions, anyways, will increase.

Have you had any problems with damage to the vehicle? When picking up drunks, my concern would be that they vomit in your car.

I keep vomit bags and a hawkeye over my passengers for that situation. Two vomiters have vomited out of my car; one has vomited in my car, but i succesfully intercepted that one. On monday, I got sick in my own car (I think food poisoning) and managed to vomit into a bag I had handy, instead of all over my own car, so there have been some residual benefits.

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