Disrupting Uber • Hacker News Board

Re: Disrupting Uber

#111

Post by massysett » Sun, Jul 31, 2016, 6:07 PM UTC

pfarnsworth wrote: post #59

hiou wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Uber is a investment fueled churn machine right now. Supply and demand(even as overly simplistic that model is) has yet to come into the equation. We will not have any idea the validity of the business model until the never before seen massive expenditures in driver acquisition subsides. Which probably won't be for several years or more.

The CEO already said that the top 30 cities produced over $1B in profits. I don't think your information is correct anymore.

Oh wow, so Kalanick opened his mouth and a huge number came out. Does he have anything on paper to back this up? An audited financial statement? Even a napkin with numbers on it?

Re: Disrupting Uber

#112

Post by tanderson92 » Sun, Jul 31, 2016, 6:10 PM UTC

Kalium wrote: post #94

tanderson92 wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The[y] appear to be complaining because Uber is lowering the cost of overly expensive taxi fares when they should be working on a system that provides rides for less money while still helping drivers get more pay (if that is important to them). This is a magazine for American Leftists, so they're really quite clear what they want: they want valuable services rendered to people with profits shared among the workers,…

Jacobin makes the core mistake of many economic radical leftists - they ignore that it's not just the good or service itself that's valuable. Quality assurance is valuable. Service discovery is valuable and so is rapid provisioning. In Jacobin's world, the only person providing value here is the driver. In the world the rest of us inhabit, things like the star-rating system and the dispatch system are valuable too.

Yes, that is an element missing in this article. I think in other places (The ABCs of Socialism by Jacobin) they have said that there will still be organizations and managers.

More generally, I'd push back a little: socialism strives to have the workers own the business (broadly, the economy) but there is of course still management and a need for QA, R&D,etc.

I like to point to Vanguard as an example of socialism that works well while people don't even realize it. The people who own Vanguard mutual funds and ETFs are collectively those who own Vanguard and control its direction. There is still a lot more than the service of a mutual fund that Vanguard provides, to the extent we don't realize its inverted corporate structure is a kind of cooperative. And all the time, the owners' financial interests come first in providing low-cost exposure to equity markets.

Why hasn't the broad mutual fund market engaged in a race to cut fees with each other? In fact it has been Vanguard's fees which have usually pushed others' lower.

Re: Disrupting Uber

#113

Post by zaroth » Sun, Jul 31, 2016, 6:13 PM UTC

stale2002 wrote: post #97

Frondo wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Waiting for driverless cars to make them profitable seems like one of the worst bets you could make. Even if they were content to wait, say, 20 years, when driverless cars hit the market, what's to stop anyone from buying a small fleet of them and tossing their own uber-like app up on the store? Heck, I can even see it in the distant future, turnkey Uber-like businesses, you get your choice of franchise to buy into.…

Its not playing the long game. Its playing the short game. Self driving cars are going to be here for consumers by 2020. What protects Uber is the network effect. Even if I had a million self driving cars right now, nobody has my app installed, and I don't have an optimized pricing and logistics set up yet. And if you have your own fleet of self driving cars, why would you build the whole setup yourself? Why not just…

If you're Apple/Google you laugh at Uber while you make your app a default on every iPhone/Android.

I doubt very much customers will have much brand loyalty to Uber. There is very little differentiation of the actual service.

Uber must be prepared for a world with self driving cars. But if their entire model requires self-driving cars in order to work, if they are simply burning cash every year until then, then I think they will burn-out long before self driving is a reality.

Re: Disrupting Uber

#114

Post by kuschku » Sun, Jul 31, 2016, 6:15 PM UTC

Frondo wrote: post #25

corin_ wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That view doesn't look at the big picture - it's very possible that they are allowing for, and happy with, losing money to grow market share for many more years, maybe even until they can offer driverless rides to turn market share into profit.

Waiting for driverless cars to make them profitable seems like one of the worst bets you could make. Even if they were content to wait, say, 20 years, when driverless cars hit the market, what's to stop anyone from buying a small fleet of them and tossing their own uber-like app up on the store? Heck, I can even see it in the distant future, turnkey Uber-like businesses, you get your choice of franchise to buy into.…

Uber is already lobbying for more regulation against competitors, and is making anti-competitive moves in the areas where they have the upper hand.

It’s clear they’re using the standard startup strategy: Getting a monopoly in a new market or by replacing an existing market, then abusing that.

Re: Disrupting Uber

#115

Post by zaroth » Sun, Jul 31, 2016, 6:20 PM UTC

flylib wrote: post #104

Frondo wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Waiting for driverless cars to make them profitable seems like one of the worst bets you could make. Even if they were content to wait, say, 20 years, when driverless cars hit the market, what's to stop anyone from buying a small fleet of them and tossing their own uber-like app up on the store? Heck, I can even see it in the distant future, turnkey Uber-like businesses, you get your choice of franchise to buy into.…

good luck finding any competitor willing to sell you a small fleet of them and let you launch a competing service, not only that they are the ones in control so if you launch a competing service with them, they could disable your cars. Uber, Apple and Google have all taken the approach that they will rely on their own autonomous systems retrofitted onto existing cars or potentially build new cars instead of relying o…

So this is an interesting thought -- will the general public even be able to own their own self driving car? Or will self-driving functionality be locked down with DRM to such a degree, will the developers of the technology hoard it / control it to the point that they are the ultimate arbiters of what you can even do with a self driving car?

What scares me is that there is absolutely precedence for companies to act like this, and I can even imagine legal arguments about the hardware requiring certain oversight and maintenance to allow self-drive to be enabled. Kind of like John Deere exerting control over their tractors but even worse.

So to your point, in such a world, no one could go out and buy a self-driving car, and certainly not a fleet of them, and then just try to independently run this service. If you want the car to drive you from Point A to Point B you would be signing a TOS saying it was for personal use, yadda yadda, and all the APIs would be completely locked down like a walled garden preventing people from taking the self-driving platform and building on top of it. This would all be in the name of safety and limiting liability, of course....

Re: Disrupting Uber

#116

Post by Kalium » Sun, Jul 31, 2016, 6:20 PM UTC

tanderson92 wrote: post #112

Kalium wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Jacobin makes the core mistake of many economic radical leftists - they ignore that it's not just the good or service itself that's valuable. Quality assurance is valuable. Service discovery is valuable and so is rapid provisioning. In Jacobin's world, the only person providing value here is the driver. In the world the rest of us inhabit, things like the star-rating system and the dispatch system are valuable too.

Yes, that is an element missing in this article. I think in other places (The ABCs of Socialism by Jacobin) they have said that there will still be organizations and managers. More generally, I'd push back a little: socialism strives to have the workers own the business (broadly, the economy) but there is of course still management and a need for QA, R&D,etc. I like to point to Vanguard as an example of socialism tha…

There will still be organziations and managers and Q&A and R&D! We'll just starve them all of resources and wonder why we're being out-competed by corporations who use different economic models and structures.

That's not an abstract hypothesis. That's what happened to the Yellow Cab Co-op in SF.

Vanguard is a decent example, but it's in a unique market where information is shared very widely and customers are extremely sensitive to price. And nothing other than price relative to returns.

Re: Disrupting Uber

#117

Post by Frondo » Sun, Jul 31, 2016, 6:31 PM UTC

stale2002 wrote: post #97

Frondo wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Waiting for driverless cars to make them profitable seems like one of the worst bets you could make. Even if they were content to wait, say, 20 years, when driverless cars hit the market, what's to stop anyone from buying a small fleet of them and tossing their own uber-like app up on the store? Heck, I can even see it in the distant future, turnkey Uber-like businesses, you get your choice of franchise to buy into.…

Its not playing the long game. Its playing the short game. Self driving cars are going to be here for consumers by 2020. What protects Uber is the network effect. Even if I had a million self driving cars right now, nobody has my app installed, and I don't have an optimized pricing and logistics set up yet. And if you have your own fleet of self driving cars, why would you build the whole setup yourself? Why not just…

"Self-driving cars in 3 1/2 years" seems, to me, like "consumer electricity from fusion in 10 years".

For fans of a technology, that's a familiar optimism. I was young once, 20 years ago, I felt that way about fusion myself, hah!

Re: Disrupting Uber

#118

Post by flylib » Sun, Jul 31, 2016, 6:32 PM UTC

zaroth wrote: post #115

flylib wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

good luck finding any competitor willing to sell you a small fleet of them and let you launch a competing service, not only that they are the ones in control so if you launch a competing service with them, they could disable your cars. Uber, Apple and Google have all taken the approach that they will rely on their own autonomous systems retrofitted onto existing cars or potentially build new cars instead of relying o…

So this is an interesting thought -- will the general public even be able to own their own self driving car? Or will self-driving functionality be locked down with DRM to such a degree, will the developers of the technology hoard it / control it to the point that they are the ultimate arbiters of what you can even do with a self driving car? What scares me is that there is absolutely precedence for companies to act l…

Here is tesla's comment on it, but it seems like they will be fully in control of the fleet/app software and could potentially favor their own cars in cities where they are running their own fleets over your own cars you have added into the fleet as it benefits them financially more.

Potentially "jailbreaking" and building your own fleet/app would be an option, not sure how legal but if tesla issues a critical security update and the vulnerability gets published by the researcher and the the jailbroken ridesharing provider you are using hasn't updated yet/can't because it will break their jailbreak in the short term, you are exposed

"When true self-driving is approved by regulators, it will mean that you will be able to summon your Tesla from pretty much anywhere. Once it picks you up, you will be able to sleep, read or do anything else enroute to your destination.

You will also be able to add your car to the Tesla shared fleet just by tapping a button on the Tesla phone app and have it generate income for you while you're at work or on vacation, significantly offsetting and at times potentially exceeding the monthly loan or lease cost. This dramatically lowers the true cost of ownership to the point where almost anyone could own a Tesla. Since most cars are only in use by their owner for 5% to 10% of the day, the fundamental economic utility of a true self-driving car is likely to be several times that of a car which is not.

In cities where demand exceeds the supply of customer-owned cars, Tesla will operate its own fleet, ensuring you can always hail a ride from us no matter where you are."

https://www.tesla.com/blog/master-plan-part-deux

Re: Disrupting Uber

#119

Post by tanderson92 » Sun, Jul 31, 2016, 6:32 PM UTC

Kalium wrote: post #102

svanderbleek wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's how economic reality should be treated. Our own reality is primary. We will take back our lives. What Jacobin is working towards is admirable. We believe in progress, that a better way is possible, and that the current state of affairs is suboptimal. We should encourage alternative economic thinking.

I am in favor of encouraging plausible, workable economic thinking. Jacobin is better described as leftist fever-dreams with roughly that level of connection to any reality. Could things work differently? Absolutely. Are they going to work differently because some hack gets off fantasizing about how in abstract theory, the services Uber performs could be better performed by a co-op that pays workers more? No. All the…

> * Function, scalable, and does not operate much like a co-op at the level of service delivery. REI falls into this category.

No true scot? The definition of a co-op is a group organized to meet economic or social desires through jointly owned business. What does this have to do with any particular approach to service delivery? You appear to be defining cooperatives as some unworkable theoretical concept and then any actual successful example of implementation is an exception. Convenient!

Vanguard also falls into this category but is absolutely a cooperative.

Re: Disrupting Uber

#120

Post by Kalium » Sun, Jul 31, 2016, 6:37 PM UTC

tanderson92 wrote: post #119

Kalium wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am in favor of encouraging plausible, workable economic thinking. Jacobin is better described as leftist fever-dreams with roughly that level of connection to any reality. Could things work differently? Absolutely. Are they going to work differently because some hack gets off fantasizing about how in abstract theory, the services Uber performs could be better performed by a co-op that pays workers more? No. All the…

> * Function, scalable, and does not operate much like a co-op at the level of service delivery. REI falls into this category. No true scot? The definition of a co-op is a group organized to meet economic or social desires through jointly owned business. What does this have to do with any particular approach to service delivery? You appear to be defining cooperatives as some unworkable theoretical concept and then an…

Workers at REI get sub-$12/hr. REI is structurally and technically a co-op. They are just a co-op that does not exhibit the benefits of a co-op that Jacobin would suggest will flow from being a co-op.

If it's structured like a co-op and exhibits none of the benefits of a co-op, what's been gained? I'm saying that co-ops generally have to sacrifice at least one of: structure, functionality, scalability.