So "not a minority" means you're a white man?
14 karma · joined May 30, 2017
Yes. And I think, as opposed to Jobs, his legacy will be rewarded.
And this is somewhat transparent, right? Everyone loves getting middle manned, I'm sure neither drivers nor passengers will mind.
Getting a lift is a commodity. It needs to be cheaper form the buyer's perspective and it needs to pay better from the driver's perspective. Not sure how that works while also earning bing money for the middle man. Uber smells like a self-driving play, and that's falling apart.
Okay, let's see them raise prices 6% in an environment with increasingly hostile regulators, increasing competition and a shallow moat and see what happens.
"Just raise prices" demonstrates a lack of fundamental economic analysis; what happens to demand? Outside of of a few city centers, people use Uber because it's cheap, not because it's cool. People will move to alternatives.
Uber is literally giving away rides, then boasting about usage. You think they can easily increase prices?
No way to predict, sure. But if my memory serves me correctly, the entire theme of Taleb's Black Swan was about accounting for such events. For example, financial hedging; you won't know what event might manifest itself and cause a huge financial disruption (the cause), but you can anticipate "it" happening, in some form, and preparing for it by buying long shot hedges (accounting for the effect).
Commoditization is about goods being of indistinguishable quality in comparison with each other, such that the consumer doesn't care which is purchased, ie one barrel of oil vs another.
http://www.cnbc.com/2014/07/29/paul-singer-this-threat-is-he...
All the signs are there! Seriously, some financial blowhard says something like this every day; why is this news?