221–230 of 257 posts
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Define unfair. How can we objectively determine what would be a fair wage for that work?
If I hire a guy to paint my house for $100, and the paint costs $105, but the painter paid for it already, that’s objectively unfair.
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Right now, Uber keeps 22 cents on each dollar paid by passengers, as its fee for creating the app, keeping it working, etc. That's cheap relative to the iTunes store, which keeps 30%. It's preposterous compared to the 3% that real-estate agents get for buying or selling a home. We really don't know what the "fair" rate is for running a ride-hailing business. We know what's been collected to date in a venture-funded d…
Autonomous cars and owning their fleet or leasing from large fleet companies is probably the end goal for increasing the share. I don't see this going any other way. These have always been a play on getting market share at a loss while the tech is being built and converting to a profitable position when there are no contractors to pay.
Are they really, in addition to all their other costs, going to stock up on millions of expensive autonomous vehicles? That's unrealistic. And if they don't, what stops for example peer-to-peer solutions to emerge that let's people rent out their cars directly? It's very possible we don't need a middleman here when autonomy is ready.
I'm usually sceptical of all the decentralised, smart-contract stuff, but renting your car to some agreed upon destination or for some time through a open-source free application sounds actually doable.
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Define unfair. How can we objectively determine what would be a fair wage for that work?
If I hire a guy to paint my house for $100, and the paint costs $105, but the painter paid for it already, that’s objectively unfair.
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It doesn't actually work that way in reality. If it did, there would already be another massive Uber undercutting Uber in eg the US market and raising $10+ billion in VC money to do it. Because hey, a $75 billion valuation is sitting right there, so it's really easy: just put $10 or $20 billion into the company, undercut Uber, IPO, easy return. Everbody can do it, just add $20 billion. What's actually the case, is th…
The company that delivers fully autonomous vehicles would have no trouble securing funding to not have to operate within Uber's walled garden and give Uber a 22% cut of profits, and make their own app. Remember, when the independent contractors go away, you don't need offices in every city to onboard drivers, you don't need a big legal team to fight the ongoing "are they contractors or employees" debate, etc. In othe…
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Anybody can make a sweet, carbonated beverage, but when Coca-Cola is faced with an ambitious and successful upstart, Coke can run at a loss to drive them out of business, or Coke can acquire them, or Coke can copy them and beat them at their own game. Uber can do all the same things to smaller competitors in it's domain. Uber's big competitors, on the global front, aren't really competitors. Uber, Grab and Didi all o…
Have you ever been to a supermarket? The market for carbonated beverages is massive with lots of competitors and tons of new entrants, as well as competitive pricing and low margins. Much like, I am arguing, the market for taxi hailing will continue to be.
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Define unfair. How can we objectively determine what would be a fair wage for that work?
If I hire a guy to paint my house for $100, and the paint costs $105, but the painter paid for it already, that’s objectively unfair.
Imho, Taking a cut of earnings is borderline unethical for a automated services, whether its lyft, upwork, or patreon. Charge a fee, know your numbers, give both sides of your service's users confidence in the service's stability.
Fundamentals question: Can somebody explain how these ridesharing companies expect to turn a profit, eventually? If you lose 50 cents on every ride, how do you make it up in volume? Every ride is subsidized by the Sand Hill Road crowd. They're a great deal. I took a 40-min ride yesterday for US$12.50 in a high-cost-of-living traffic-clogged city. How can that make sense? A ride in a sketchy 1970s-era New York City gy…
They "lose 50 cents" per ride at the current volume but their fixed costs only go up slightly for each ride, so at double the volume, they could be turning a profit instead of a loss.
The number isn't really related to their actual marginal cost of providing the service.
Fundamentals question: Can somebody explain how these ridesharing companies expect to turn a profit, eventually? If you lose 50 cents on every ride, how do you make it up in volume? Every ride is subsidized by the Sand Hill Road crowd. They're a great deal. I took a 40-min ride yesterday for US$12.50 in a high-cost-of-living traffic-clogged city. How can that make sense? A ride in a sketchy 1970s-era New York City gy…
>If you lose 50 cents on every ride, how do you make it up in volume? They "lose 50 cents" per ride at the current volume but their fixed costs only go up slightly for each ride, so at double the volume, they could be turning a profit instead of a loss. The number isn't really related to their actual marginal cost of providing the service.
Early on, they hoped to become monopolies and raise prices, reaching profitability.
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You’re forgetting the cost to develop the software itself. It’s like saying a gigabyte of data on a wireless carrier cost them pennies in electricity and bandwidth.
>You’re forgetting the cost to develop the software itself No, I'm (correctly) excluding it from the list of things they have to pay for to provide one more ride. >It’s like saying a gigabyte of data on a wireless carrier cost them pennies in electricity and bandwidth. It's more like: Verizon is unprofitable. People keep repeating the claim that, "lol, Verizon mobile actually loses money for every byte of data they t…