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Uber Plans Millions in Back Pay After Shortchanging NYC Drivers

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Re: Uber Plans Millions in Back Pay After Shortchanging NYC Drivers

#111

Post by potatolicious »

wnevets wrote: post #73
potatolicious wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What your driver was talking about may not be a bug/math error like stated here. After rolling out guaranteed whole-ride pricing (as opposed to metering) Uber is allegedly testing algorithms to bid different prices for rides to both driver and passenger. i.e., passenger sees a fare of $X, while driver sees a fare of $Y, where presumably $Y Passengers' fares can be "optimized" by estimating a specific passenger-trip's…

>To be clear, I find this entire concept incredibly abhorrent why?

Effective and fair markets rely on transparency, while this is the exact opposite - the deliberate creation of massive information asymmetry.

Worse even, the information asymmetry isn't meant to favor one side of the transaction over the other (say, passengers over drivers), but is meant to favor the exchange (Uber) itself.

Imagine if you went to your stock broker to buy 10 shares of XYZ. Your broker tells you that the market price is $100 per share, but in reality found a seller at $80/share and is pocketing the difference, without disclosing this to either party in the transaction.

Besides the ethical shadiness of this kind of action, functioning markets are predicated on buyers and sellers having sufficient information, and the exchange behaving in consistent and transparent ways. This sort of double-dealing undermines it.

Another poster snidely speculates that I may operate on a moral framework that finds profit-seeking intrinsically objectionable. This seems like a straw man that's intended to erase the difference between unfair market practices and fair market practices.

Re: Uber Plans Millions in Back Pay After Shortchanging NYC Drivers

#112

Post by bduerst »

surds wrote: post #102

The valuation argument always leads to 'driverless' cars. Makes me wonder - if all cars can be 'driverless', why would you prefer to call for an Uber and not use your own?

Your question assumes that Uber's market share as a ride-hailing app will somehow benefit them as a self-driving car company.

Re: Uber Plans Millions in Back Pay After Shortchanging NYC Drivers

#113

Post by SilasX »

Pxtl wrote: post #79
SilasX wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Someone else pays for the upkeep of those roads, without which their business could not exist. Everyone pays gas taxes that scale with the amount driven and therefore their use of the roads. Any unusually high driving would be made up by the higher gas consumption and the resultant taxes thereon. If anything: 1) Taxi routes are concentrated in cities, where they have lower miles per gallon and thus pay more taxes pe…

In the USA, gas taxes cover only a tiny fraction of damage to roadway. In Europe it heavily exceeds it, and most of Canada is about break-even. And that's of course ignoring that gas taxes are meant to not simply be user-fees for the roadway. Also ignoring costs outside of infrastructure - stuff like traffic enforcement and health costs. And it assumes the land the road was built on was free - which it obviously isn'…

Yes, in the aggregate, gas taxes don't cover maintenance; but, as I said in points 1) and 2), the typical urban sedan driver is still overpaying since they cause virtually none of the maintenance costs (by percentage). (AIUI, any cab taxes exist to fund the regulatory costs, not the excess wear they're causing.)

Furthermore, the point under debate was whether Uber, as a cab[-like] service is underpaying for its road usage -- relative to the typical person -- by driving so much more; that point is still wrong because their per mile costs are unchanged with such higher usage.

Re: Uber Plans Millions in Back Pay After Shortchanging NYC Drivers

#114

Post by rhizome »

potatolicious wrote: post #10
chipgap98 wrote: post #3

That's a huge "bug" not to notice for presumably a long time. I recently had a Lyft driver in NYC talk to me about how he quit uber after doing the math on what his fare should have been when a passenger told him how much they were being charged. He brought it up to uber and then quit when they didn't fix it. Anecdotal story but seems extremely relevant now

What your driver was talking about may not be a bug/math error like stated here. After rolling out guaranteed whole-ride pricing (as opposed to metering) Uber is allegedly testing algorithms to bid different prices for rides to both driver and passenger. i.e., passenger sees a fare of $X, while driver sees a fare of $Y, where presumably $Y Passengers' fares can be "optimized" by estimating a specific passenger-trip's…

So by this they're just throwing "let's see if we can run an arbitrage on the concept of price sensitivity itself" against a wall and see who will fund it?

Re: Uber Plans Millions in Back Pay After Shortchanging NYC Drivers

#115

Post by smogcutter »

potatolicious wrote: post #10
chipgap98 wrote: post #3

That's a huge "bug" not to notice for presumably a long time. I recently had a Lyft driver in NYC talk to me about how he quit uber after doing the math on what his fare should have been when a passenger told him how much they were being charged. He brought it up to uber and then quit when they didn't fix it. Anecdotal story but seems extremely relevant now

What your driver was talking about may not be a bug/math error like stated here. After rolling out guaranteed whole-ride pricing (as opposed to metering) Uber is allegedly testing algorithms to bid different prices for rides to both driver and passenger. i.e., passenger sees a fare of $X, while driver sees a fare of $Y, where presumably $Y Passengers' fares can be "optimized" by estimating a specific passenger-trip's…

Bloomberg's Matt Levine on this: https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2017-05-22/fitbit-qu...

In a nutshell, uber is changing their business from charging a commission to acting more like a retailer: buy low (from drivers) and sell high (to passengers). The problem is that normally the two far ends of that transaction only ever interact with the middleman, but here they're literally sitting in the same car. Hard for both the buyer and seller not to feel (justifiably) ripped off when they can actually compare notes. Especially if even after their margin Uber is still taking a percentage of the driver's pay.

Re: Uber Plans Millions in Back Pay After Shortchanging NYC Drivers

#116

Post by jsemrau »

It was painfully obvious already a long time ago that Uber uses the investor money to purchase the market[1]. For any Asian and European city I have ever lived in the calculation never worked. And I still believe it would have been better to just give the Billions to the several taxi companies and have them build a better app. Maybe even work with the car companies and have them build this functionality in their cars from scratch.

[1] https://medium.com/@thisTenqyuLife/nobody-will-talk-about-ub...

Re: Uber Plans Millions in Back Pay After Shortchanging NYC Drivers

#117

Post by s0rce »

pavel_lishin wrote: post #44
bdcravens wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My first Uber was at RubyConf in San Diego a few years ago. We (a couple of devs that I met) were downtown at a meetup the day before, and we were going back to our hotel, a couple miles away downtown - nothing out of the ordinary. Our Uber driver had trouble communicating, and was asking us for directions. He revealed he had only been in town a couple of days. I was in the front seat, with two other devs in the back…

Can't say I've ever been treated to the sexual non-history of my taxi driver, but last weekend we grabbed a NYC cab with a driver who had no GPS, and no smart phone - we had to give him turn-by-turn directions to our destination in the Bronx. I don't expect my cabbies to have The Knowledge, but it would be nice if I didn't have to have my phone out the whole time, watching for upcoming turns and highway exits. At lea…

Although they have a phone and internet there is no guarantee the gps is working/on. I've had an uber that took a long time to arrive due to incorrect gps and then I had to give them directions on the way, they must have been using wifi/cell tower positions as the location on the phone was wrong and jumping around.

Re: Uber Plans Millions in Back Pay After Shortchanging NYC Drivers

#118

Post by chimeracoder »

smt88 wrote: post #67
wehadfun wrote: post #14

Uber drivers could go on strike from Uber and still earn by driving for LYFT. They could demand what ever they want.

You can't strike without a union, and Uber is fighting hard against drivers unionizing.

> You can't strike without a union

This is absolutely, completely false. Both legally and practically.

Re: Uber Plans Millions in Back Pay After Shortchanging NYC Drivers

#119

Post by anigbrowl »

Relevant self-link on corporate wage theft: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14380908

This is another example of why I think developers need to professionalize the industry and set ethical standards.

Why do people willingly write code to automate the process off ripping off their own co-workers to enrich shareholders? Because if they don't, someone else will.

Maybe it's time to stop being developers and start being engineers. Ask yourself who benefits from software development being an ethics-free zone? Most likely, it's not you.

Re: Uber Plans Millions in Back Pay After Shortchanging NYC Drivers

#120

Post by samstave »

aetherson wrote: post #85
leggomylibro wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is; they are hemorrhaging money, and only manage to stay afloat because of the billions of dollars being shoveled into the furnace by investors and nation-states. In a way, venture capital is subsidizing your rides. They're not insane, though. They're buying market share and betting that they can pull self-driving cars into their fleets while they still have the market on lock. Without having to pay drivers or…

Let's be clear that "they're buying market share and betting that they can pull self-driving cars into their fleets" thing is revisionist history. Nobody who invested billions in Uber years ago was told, "Our plan is to burn your money and win driverless cars." They didn't even have a driverless car program until about two years ago. Uber thought that they had a viable business model based on human drivers, and that…

Honestly though, years ago when I heard on the radio that google gave Uber 1 billion in funding I loudly exclaimed to everyone in my tiny office "ah... they want to invest in self driving cars through Uber!"

So yeah, there were plenty of people who were looking at that. I think they just didn't know how expensive that long con would wind up being

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