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The Uber Bubble

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Re: The Uber Bubble

#201

Post by AlexandrB »

bombcar wrote: post #145
Gwypaas wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Uber is being disrupted by for example Bolt, which is their frugal Estonian competitor. An example close to me is that Uber essentially already lost the Swedish taxi market. They had a couple of years as the the top dog making everyone install an app but due to the huge overhead got undercut. This is a market with a completely unregulated taxi sector as long as you follow the base regulations. Maybe sometimes a bit a…

Yeah if you do the math you end up realizing you need to run the cars like airlines run planes - damn near continuously. Idle time is non paid time, and you need to keep everything moving. The real advantage of self driving taxis isn’t going to be the self driving, it’s going to be the 24 hour/day shifts they can pull.

That doesn't really work for taxis. No matter how much you want to distribute rides across the whole day, no discount is going to be able to get people to commute to work at midnight - most of your rides will happen around 9am and 5pm. So many taxis will have to spend a good chunk of the day idle. With self-driving taxis, at least you're not paying human drivers for some of this idle time (which Uber doesn't either AFAIK, but traditional taxis do).

This is in contrast to air travel, where with the right discounts you can get people to fly at inconvenient times of day.

Re: The Uber Bubble

#203

Post by injidup »

Barrin92 wrote: post #22

The piece is exactly right. Uber is effectively an instrument to shift economic gains from labour to capital by atomizing the workforce. From a macroeconomic perspective this is terrible because turning taxi firms into countless of one man businesses provides no efficiency gains, it's basically reverse economic development. There is a version of Uber that actually makes sense. As a lean SaaS company that sells its so…

As a customer I don't care about economic theory. What I care about is that I take out my mobile, press a couple of buttons and I know the price and time of pick up. This is innovation. Before über nobody was doing this. This has been a huge efficiency gain. The service is safe and reliable and trackable. This really has nothing to do with employees vs contractors. If the government legislated that uber drivers had to be treated as employees, the innovation that uber brought to the market would not disappear. Might be a bit more expensive but we would not be going back to hailing random taxis on the street or calling numbers and negotiating with call centres.

Re: The Uber Bubble

#204

Post by djbusby »

seoaeu wrote: post #188
treis wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think people drastically overestimate the depreciation from mileage. When you go to sell your car in 15 years the difference between 150k and 300k miles is maybe a couple grand. You're taking about a few cents per hour.

The amount (and cost!) of maintenance to get a car to last 15 years is going to vary significantly based on how much it is driven

And where! Salty New England snow/slush will wreck the carriage, compared to winter in San Diego.

Re: The Uber Bubble

#205

Post by john_moscow »

ceeplusplus wrote: post #156
acchow wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are 100% correct. This is the magic There are people who want to make a positive return on their time + vehicle depreciation. But they are on the open market competing against people who are in a cash crunch and happy to have a net negative return on the same, as long as it temporarily allows them to convert depreciation into cash. This is why drivers will always lose in the long term. They are racing against eac…

That's because depreciation is a paper loss. If you're an average person you're not selling your car for a new one for at least 7-8 years after you buy it. By that time it's worth very little of its original cost anyways. The only actual cost incurred by the driver is repairs and maintenance, which is nowhere near the cost of depreciation on the car. In effect, the depreciation schedule changes, but on the time scale…

Except for having to change tires, oil and brake pads earlier, and also having to deal with more mechanical issues due to sheer mileage.

Re: The Uber Bubble

#206

Post by tharne »

nonrandomstring wrote: post #169

I feel this entire thread has quite missed the point of the question the way a neutrino passes through a solid object and interacts with nothing but empty space. People have talked about microeconomics, gig economies, labour shifting, bad old days, safety, subsidies, licenses.... but we've gotten no closer to understanding; "Why Is a Company That Lost Billions Claimed to Be Successful?" To answer this one must ask "W…

This is a brilliant explanation of financialisation.

Re: The Uber Bubble

#207

Post by jsemrau »

oblio wrote: post #25
jsemrau wrote: post #8

By the measure of growth and market penetration, Uber has been successful. By the measure of establishing a globally operating business that employs thousands of people, Uber has been successful (mostly). By the measure of establishing a profitable business we might argue that they likely will never achieve that. If you look at their SEA competitors who already earlier on introduced financial debt as a tool to create…

> By the measure of establishing a profitable business we might argue that they likely will never achieve that. A "profitable business" was what we'd call a business, back in the day. Companies weren't able to last 5-10 years of losses.

I would argue that they only survived their post IPO valuation because stock markets have been artificially propped up. Interestingly only 25% of shareholders are retail vs 75% institutional.

Re: The Uber Bubble

#208

Post by gruez »

nonrandomstring wrote: post #192
gruez wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Under financialised logic it is absolutely immaterial whether Twitter, Uber or whatever make a penny. Ever. Or whether any of the stakeholders are served. The rules of traditional business go out the window. What makes you think that shareholders in Twitter or Uber don't care that they'll never make a penny? They're not turning a profit now, but it seems at least somewhat plausible that they'll make money in the fut…

> What makes you think that shareholders in Twitter or Uber don't care that they'll never make a penny? Who are "they"? Be specific. The shareholders can make a pretty penny while the companies never do. Because they're shareholders, not workers, or customers, or execs, or owners. > what someone is willing to pay for it", not its actual utility Pay for what? Please be specific. The service of the company or the value…

>Who are "they"? Be specific.

The company.

>The shareholders can make a pretty penny while the companies never do. Because they're shareholders, not workers, or customers, or execs, or owners.

What are you arguing for here? In the first comment the problem seems to be that the company isn't profitable, but in this comment you the problem seems to be the fact that shareholders are making money but the "workers, or customers, or execs, or owners" aren't. Can you lay out your specific claims?

>Pay for what? Please be specific. The service of the company or the value of its share?

The principle applies to all goods/services, but in this case I was talking about the shares in the compayn.

>The "actual utility" of a share is nothing but it's propensity to go up. Financial markets don't care about anything else.

And what do you think that share prices are driven by? Do you think a few men in a smoke filled room arbitrarily set the price, making it go up and up?

Re: The Uber Bubble

#209

Post by civilized »

ggm wrote: post #24

They also expatriate profits from economies, and are probably using international tax minimisation methods.

> They also expatriate profits from economies

All non-local trade does this.

> probably using international tax minimisation methods.

All companies and individuals make some effort to minimize their tax liabilities.

Re: The Uber Bubble

#210

Post by alexpotato »

wefarrell wrote: post #86
darth_avocado wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Legacy taxis were and still are a more expensive and inefficient business. Outside of airports and maybe cities like New York, hailing a taxi was a terrible experience. The scale of Uber despite their shitty business model, allows them to have a lot more drivers constantly on the road than traditional companies. This allows for an quicker availability of a cab at a moment’s notice. Anyone remember leaving a party bef…

Even in NYC hailing a taxi was a terrible experience if you were a minority or were traveling outside of Manhattan or North of 125th.

Or during special events.

I remember one Super Bowl weekend trying to get home via cab from Tribeca after the game was over.

Looking down West Broadway, you could see multiple groups of people at each intersection with their arms up trying to get the first cab to go by.

Or during just times in general. When I first moved to NYC, I was my normal polite self when people would say "I hailed it first" and let them take the cab. After the fourth or fifth time this happened with cabs I was 90% I had hailed first, I realized you had to pretend to be some alpha male and shout "Get the F away from my cab!" in order to guarantee you got in the cab.

I don't know if anyone keeps stats on this but I would bet money that the number of fights in NYC due to the above must have gone down once Uber became common.

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