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Uber Posts $5.2B Loss and Slowest Ever Growth Rate

nytimes.com

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Re: Uber Posts $5.2B Loss and Slowest Ever Growth Rate

#321

Post by xster »

Decathect wrote: post #291
xster wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think this is what worries me about the "mainstream" debate that might be incorrectly framing the whole problem altogether. Here, the rise of the gig economy came from automation. Not in the caricature sense that there are robot automatons that serve your plates in a restaurant, but in a sense that scalable automated processes replaced human dispatchers that answers your phone calls at the taxi companies and radios…

Wealth is accruing to people with power and capital. The people who produce automations are laborers like the rest of society, just with a temporarily elevated standard of living. As writing software is deskilled and supplanted, it'll be increasingly apparent that we were just a midterm necessary evil to the people signing our paychecks. To me, the central problem is wealth disparity as a proxy for power disparity: o…

Right (and slightly orthogonal, back to the mode of production topic), I think we can treat it in 2 ways:

1- We recognize this Bonds villain plan, we stop it and go back to our happy pastural life and everyone lives happily ever after; or

2- We grant ourselves this new productivity as a reward that frees us from labor (but in the process have to answer the hard question of how to deal with going from solving the conflict between the 1% and the 99% to solving the conflict between the 0.0001% and the 99.9999%)

Re: Uber Posts $5.2B Loss and Slowest Ever Growth Rate

#322

Post by AdrianB1 »

paxys wrote: post #298
Udik wrote: post #268

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can I ask something that will sound incredibly naive? How complicated needs to be an IT infrastructure that lets you book a taxi via an app and pay the driver? Is it really something to throw billions at each year? Sometimes I feel these companies are throwing billions in IT simply because they're expected to be disruptive technology companies, and not for real technical reasons.

Uber as a product is very technologically complex, mainly because of the scale it operates at. You can read about some of their tech at https://eng.uber.com .

Only if you want to have a huge and complex system. If you have small and localized ones, it should be very cheap.

Re: Uber Posts $5.2B Loss and Slowest Ever Growth Rate

#323

Post by clairity »

xster wrote: post #229
coldtea wrote: post #95

Glad they're down, and hope the whole "gig economy" burns down too. Where gig economy = padding the loss of decent jobs by replacing the bottom end with desperate deals where "non employed" employees, without regular salary, benefits, company provided work tools, etc., make a pittance, while the organizing company gets a cut from millions of transactions. In some cases, no jobs is better than subsistence/dead-end/exp…

I think this is what worries me about the "mainstream" debate that might be incorrectly framing the whole problem altogether. Here, the rise of the gig economy came from automation. Not in the caricature sense that there are robot automatons that serve your plates in a restaurant, but in a sense that scalable automated processes replaced human dispatchers that answers your phone calls at the taxi companies and radios…

this kind of thinking so vastly underestimates the creative capacity of humans and the amazing nimbleness of the invisible hand, not to mention the sheer vastness of existence itself. humans will work on other, bigger, more varied, and more complex problems. we have not solved the universe yet, let alone understand even the basic workings of biochemical machinery. there is a crap ton of things we can apply our mental capacity to. we've had this kind of worry since at least the industrial revolution, and somehow we're all still working, despite unprecedented productivity and an order of magnitude more people.

UBI is a patronizing and elitist social welfare pipe dream to address a problem that doesn't exist. as silly as 'social media influencers' may be, they're an apt example of how the world changes in unexpected ways to accomodate the ambitions of some of the billions of people on this earth with active brains and pumping hearts.

Re: Uber Posts $5.2B Loss and Slowest Ever Growth Rate

#325

Post by AdrianB1 »

rgejman wrote: post #315

Is uber just an elaborate vehicle designed to redistribute wealth from investors to cab drivers and computers engineers?

And top management. In corporate America each person in top management earns as much as dozens to hundreds of their low end workers.

Re: Uber Posts $5.2B Loss and Slowest Ever Growth Rate

#326

Post by cryptozeus »

effingwewt wrote: post #317
cryptozeus wrote: post #303

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“Uber, which aspires to become an Amazon-like store for all forms of transportation, is also investing in the development of autonomous cars, public transit deals, the expansion of its bicycle and scooter business, and in its freight delivery platform.” Remember how amazon was never profitable for years and everyone missed the boat on crazy upside. Remember Tesla ? Remember facebook and twitter before they started ma…

Except Uber is not just 'not profitable' they are upside down after having been floated on nothing but VC money. Paying someone $2 for every $1 they give you is never going to be a sustainable business model.

They will raise prices in that case. Or we have yet to see some kind of advertising model from them.

Re: Uber Posts $5.2B Loss and Slowest Ever Growth Rate

#327

Post by spike021 »

cal5k wrote: post #221
xyzzyz wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did you know that in most places where cab are operating, you could order a cab to pick you up at your house by calling a cab company and talking to the operator? Flagging down a cab as it drives by is a New York City thing.

Sure, and it might arrive in 10 minutes, 30 minutes, an hour, or never. It's an awful experience.

Eh there have been plenty of times where requesting an Uber took one of those amounts of times too.

Re: Uber Posts $5.2B Loss and Slowest Ever Growth Rate

#328

Post by ALittleLight »

Roritharr wrote: post #206
eanzenberg wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What happened to personal responsibility? Is that out the window as well? Or do we need intervention, similar to how parents point their kids in the proper direction to go?

I'm a big personal responsibility advocate myself, but I'm also someone who was stumped today trying to pick the best deal on kitchen paper in the supermarket. A market only works efficient when there is information parity, but a small-time Uber driver can't put a data science team on the job to make sure Uber isn't abusing their information advantage, so in this case i'd only find it fair to require them to do those…

Haven't other people already done the analysis as to why driving for Uber is a bad financial decision? The average driver isn't equipped to do the financial analysis, but surely he could do a bit of reading online about a future career.

Re: Uber Posts $5.2B Loss and Slowest Ever Growth Rate

#329

Post by icebraining »

johnday wrote: post #290
ekr wrote: post #287

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> In some cases, no jobs is better than subsistence/dead- end/exploitative jobs. At least the former makes the problem evident, and ups the pressure to do something about it on a society/policy/economy level -- as opposed to helping perpetuate it. I strongly disagree with this position. Yeah, sure, supporting people at the brink of poverty is one of the government's responsibilities, but taking away one of the few op…

We have seen what happens when someone who should receive Government protection is able to get by without them; those protections are removed. See the hospitality industry for an example. They have tips, so they don't get minimum wage. The US government is famously bad at protecting people who need it. Anything which disguised that fact, even a little, should be removed.

To remove the gig economy, you need legislative power. But if you have legislative power, you can create those protections.

Re: Uber Posts $5.2B Loss and Slowest Ever Growth Rate

#330

Post by ghaff »

refurb wrote: post #250
ghaff wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What percentage of the US population do you think has taken an Uber in the past month? From January: "According to a new poll conducted by the Pew Research Center, just 36 percent of American adults say they have used ride-hailing services. Sixty-one percent say they have heard of the services but hadn’t taken a ride." https://www.wired.com/story/uber-lyft-ride-hail-stats-pew-re... Heck. I travel lots and it's probab…

I think the GP has a point though. It's not as though UBER going under is going to tank the economy, but it will be a major unicorn going under, causing the entire silicon valley money-losing model to be questioned, leading to trouble raising money, layoffs which drag down the rest of the economy. Similar to the 2000 crash.

That's not the world economy though. It's a bunch of highly-paid software developers losing their jobs and a subsequent (though probably rather delayed) crash in Bay Area real estate. Though that really depends on Google, Apple, etc. more than startups.

Not great for devs looking for 6 figure jobs in the Bay Area. But not clear how broad the effect would be--unless they were triggered by more serious external events.

And 2000 crash also was associated with other things like 9/11 so it's easy to conflate.

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