331–340 of 516 posts
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...Uber when it first started was a Black Car service... you can still call a black car service and it will be a certified livery driver. There are also still plenty of black car services around if you are concerned about loss of quality in more affordable offerings (where did you think the tradeoff was going to be for a more affordable solution? Purely scale?)
You can still choose a black sedan, but that doesn't mean anything. It's just a random guy with a more expensive car. I didn't think there was going to be a tradeoff. There was never supposed to be. The idea that random people would drive others around was never part of Uber's business plan, that's why it was called "Uber" to begin with. It was never part of anyone's business plan—it was illegal. Lyft came along and…
> It's just a random guy with a more expensive car.
The big one is they are required to be commercially registered and commercially insured. At least here in Chicago it's usually the private chauffeur's with a livery license plate in sedan/limo. I'm guessing they do Uber black on the side.
Anyway, yes they are "just random guys" just like any other Uber driver but they've had to jump through extra hoops which affects who does it. I'm not saying that causes a better selection but there is specific difference between the two, other than just requiring a better car.
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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…
Yep, this is a fascinating (and scary) thing to think about. What will happen to a society where every single person has their basic needs met by some form of automation, and nobody needs to work? I would say most first world countries are already in this scenario if so much money wasn't spent on non essentials. Industrial scale farming, mass produced pharmaceuticals, rapid house construction etc. mean that if a soci…
Right now, that definition is commercial GDP value, but even that metric's inventor warned us that it's a bullshit metric [1].
Old people living by themselves sometimes spam call doctors, not for their heart bypass commercial value, but to feel materially better after talking to another human, which has no commercial value.
When I was trying to figure out what to do after high school, I was full of energy and curiosity for this world and wanted to do everything from being a historian, to a musician, to astrophysics, which, let's face it, has no commercial value. Now I'm coding. Luckily I like coding, but not everyone's lucky to have their interests align with commercial value.
Maybe it's not so bad for humans to be humans again.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gross_domestic_product#History
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The only way they survive as such a richly valued company perhaps, my point is they could provide the current level of service with vastly lower spending and be a sustainable company. The financial problems aren't they charge too little for rides, it's that they have thousands of people working on bullshit that brings in little to nothing.
Sorry, but I have to disagree. R&D is the life blood of a tech company. Some problems are hard. Hard problems take a lot of time and money to solve. If they spend $2B solving a problem that allows them to make $10B in revenue long term, I would say that is a worthwhile investment, wouldn't you? Frankly, the R&D spend is the least of their worries. They recently trimmed some fat from their marketing department[1] but…
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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 conf…
If we keep automating everything and capital gets to own the cloud processing power that allows for it, and we “rent everything” as some people are predicting, what the hell earning power will anyone have unless they work in AI or programming new things to automate?
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 know of no one who drives for Uber/Lyft who doesn't think they are doing well. Seriously, where did this meme come about where they are all slaves to Uber? Between what two bring in each week and their mileage deductions they are tempting me at times. the real tripe in the gig economy is all the pontificating coming down from top how they all care about rights of people, except it only is Western people they care a…
Uber emerged into the market as a disruptor in the absolute worst sense of the world - it was challenging an entrenched industry with low efficiency (cab companies make ungodly amounts of money in some markets) but it did so by playing by a different set of rules - skirting both the disingenuous regulations put in to protect cab companies' profit and those in place for the safety of the general public. Even disregard…
You are missing the part where Uber let you get a cab through an app rather than hoping a taxi was driving by and waving your hands at them. It really is a far, far better product when you can get a cab wherever you want, instead of just in a few areas.
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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…
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…
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…
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…
Not sure why I bother anymore because people don't appreciate these types of comments, but I am convinced the solution is to replace the monopoly companies with public decentralized protocols that will enable a large shared network of customers to be serviced by a competing field of service companies that plug into it.