211–220 of 234 posts
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Except they also penalize drivers for not accepting many rides. So if you want to continue driving for Uber, you have to "sell" your driving services at some point, even if the price isn't good for you.
As well they should, otherwise it'd be impossible to get ubers from certain places or at certain times.
What is it, free market only works for Uber but not for the drivers?
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?
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I agree that one possible synergy at the time between Google and Uber was that Uber might use Google's driverless car technology. That's very different from the revisionist rationale that Uber was always themselves making a long term play for driverless vehicles, or that Google got into Uber because Google wanted to invest in driverless vehicles. The narrative at the time was that Uber was going to become a dominant…
Uber's first massive round was in August 2013. By that time, everyone knew driverless cars were going to be critically important in the long term and Uber would have to make a build vs. buy decision. Whether Uber was ferrying passengers or goods didn't really impact this. But yes, the investment thesis has always depended on passenger taxi being a decent business for Uber in the midterm.
The claim at the time was that Uber would ferry both passengers and goods. And we agree that the value Uber was claiming was dependent on being a decent business.
I think that what happened since was they were forced into the "build" side of the build/buy decision when it became increasingly clear that they didn't have a decent business in passenger taxi, and they weren't getting traction in logistics. At that point, if they bought driverless cars, you would be forgiven for asking what value exactly Uber was bringing to any business. Now they have to bank on their differentiator being that they have unique access to valuable driverless car tech, which still strikes me as grossly unlikely.
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When I read about stuff like this and also how Uber is losing a lot of money, I have to wonder if maybe there's a fundamental problem with their business model.
Their value isn't in the driver business, because eventually they'll just have to pay for the marginal cost of damage to the car. If they can optimize pricing between locations better than others, they'll win in the driverless world. (This drives the value, not the spread between what they pay and collect)
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worse than taxis (in some ways) for drivers ... and taxpayers. Someone else pays for the upkeep of those roads, without which their business could not exist. In the UK, someone else pays for the healthcare of their drivers, as they dodge Employer's NI. Etc etc. The entire business model of "disruption" is pocketing what everyone else pays for the dependencies and externalities.
>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…
If talking about the UK, that is not quite correct. Roads in the UK are mainly funded by income tax and council tax. See http://ipayroadtax.com/ for more information.
I'm breaking a 4 yr HN commenting-hiatus to post this: it's a bit disappointing to see how the quality of HN comments has deteriorated over the years. Virtually all the comments I'm seeing here are sensationalist sentiments/anecdotes, backed with no facts, reverberated in an echo chamber. This is a plead to the HN moderators to continue to iterate on your product to improve the quality of the comments.
Literally every forum I have ever been on, when it gets old enough, complains about declining quality and new users. There was a big discussion about this on a popular IRC I used to hang out on. And I spent the weekend setting up a bot to replay messages from 4 years ago in real time. And the general opinion was that the quality wasn't any higher back then. Same thing with a default subreddit I moderated. We got endl…
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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…
Now everybody has one. 33 companies have registered with the California DMV to test. Five more accidents are listed for March and April. Cruise has three; they were rear-ended twice while stopped, and were clipped once by a pickup trying to drive around a double-parked mobile crane. Waymo was rear-ended once, and was forced off the road into a curb once by a vehicle drifting out of lane.
This is progress. Cruise is getting hit when it's not their fault, which is way ahead of their earlier driving record. We're seeing more unusual situations, where the other driver did something weird. Nobody was hurt in any of these.
The auto industry is indicating that the 2020 model year is when self-driving starts to ship. They have to be public about that, because the parts suppliers need to get their production lines ready to make the components in quantity. It's not going to be just Uber. It's going to be all the big automakers.
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but your initial attitude should be "let's try to work within society's boundaries to achieve our goal" Why on earth is that the case? This viewpoint imbues "society's boundaries" with some kind of a-priori correctness, when really it has the same as any other concept: 0, until proven otherwise.
It's not a-priori correctness, but a-priori precedence, or respect. You live in a society, you benefit from society, you would not be capable of starting a business without society, so you shouldn't casually dismiss society. Basically all I'm saying is that you need a good reason to break the rules. "This makes it harder for me to make money" is not a good reason. "There's no other way to achieve my worthwhile goal"…
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It's not a-priori correctness, but a-priori precedence, or respect. You live in a society, you benefit from society, you would not be capable of starting a business without society, so you shouldn't casually dismiss society. Basically all I'm saying is that you need a good reason to break the rules. "This makes it harder for me to make money" is not a good reason. "There's no other way to achieve my worthwhile goal"…
Dismissing a restriction of society is not the same as dismissing society, in the same way that ignoring the speed limit or ripping your own music is not the same as ignoring the concept of law.
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That may be true, but I assume Uber commits to paying drivers $X per mile or hour or something similar (as stated in that article). Surely, you won't drive for Uber if you don't know exactly how much money you make and if it's always subject to changes and experimentation?
People only drive for Uber if they have to in the first place, so now they are testing exactly how much of a beating drivers are willing to take before they leave. They already know the answer is "a lot" so they'll keep on pushing.
This is completely opposite my anecdotal experience. When I ask uber drivers why they drive for uber, the majority say they left a previous job for uber because of the money/flexibility/less-stress.