151–160 of 318 posts
Can we get an open source gig economy app where 75% of the profits go to gig workers? Then 7.5% would go towards employee rights and benefits of gig workers, 7.5% towards contributors improving the software, and 10% towards customer support and legal third parties.
Can we get an open source gig economy app where 75% of the profits go to gig workers? Then 7.5% would go towards employee rights and benefits of gig workers, 7.5% towards contributors improving the software, and 10% towards customer support and legal third parties.
Huh? Nothing stops gig workers as it is from organizing and just paying an app developer. The unions simply can't make inroads with them for whatever reasons.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Huh? Nothing stops gig workers as it is from organizing and just paying an app developer. The unions simply can't make inroads with them for whatever reasons.
One reason being union-busting behaviors from the threatened firms, obviously.
Any article that says: > Anybody who’s ever taken an Economics 101 course knows clearly has no idea what they're talking about. Real market are far more complex than what can be described by Economics 101
Gotta start somewhere, I guess - but I'm just afraid that because I'm nowhere near an expert that I'll be bamboozled by someone with legitimate qualifications, but without realizing that they're actually still not qualified to speak about the subject either.
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You could just phone a cab, no? That's what I did anyway; it's less convenient than an app, but back in the day you didn't have mobile phones either so not much option really. I don't really see how an "app" is fundamentally all that different, and it's kind of an obvious thing to add once smartphones become popular. I agree that Uber injected some fresh energy in a somewhat complacent market, but the real "innovatio…
>You could just phone a cab, no? That's what I did anyway; it's less convenient than an app, [...] I don't really see how an "app" is fundamentally all that different, It's more than just a substitution of tapping an icon vs dialing a phone number. The Uber business model of non-medallion cars and geographic matching algorithm builds up a "distributed mesh" of drivers to serve passengers -- especially those who are n…
I find this interesting because on the food delivery side, this is kind of mental gymnastics the worker needs to do. If it is a busy evening hour, do you want to take a (small) McDonalds order? Most likely not, unless there is a nice tip. You could do at least two deliveries in the time you wait for the McD order.
I imagine rider side is the same way as delivery. Every worker has to do this sanity check if whether something is worth doing.
If workers are taking low reward rides or deliveries, it is probably because they think they aren't missing out on something better.
I just find it really weird that there wasn't a thinktank in 2005 or so, that said "Okay, what are the next big phone applications?" and invented Uber and a few others. What is the point of these thinktanks if they can't predict 3 years ahead along our current technological advancement curve?
I have friends in South Africa who built a small business similar to uber in 2004 on SMS and future phones. Worked really well, however, at the end of the day an idea does not build a business like uber. Extremely well executed startups does, which of course requires a team in just the right milieu and timing.
(I assume you meant "feature-phone" there?)
You should tell your SA friends to reach out to some tech journos, they'd love to write a "Uber before Uber" story, and I'd like to know the reasons why their project didn't pan-out myself. SMS-based applications had a lot of potential in the mid-2000s, often the failures were elsewhere, and doesn't SA also have SMS-based billing too? that could have been an amazingly successful service...
Fully agree with this. It seems like so many of the apps that come to dominate just make up for shortcomings unique to the US that then, with money, take over the rest of the west for no good reason other than scale to get 25 people at the top of those companies rich. I’ve never seen the need for Uber. Taxis have never been an issue in the UK and the most successful firms in the city I lived when Uber was starting ou…
Absolutely disagree - taxis in the UK used to be awful, none of them had apps before Uber. Black cabs in London were generally good due to the high entry requirements but you could only get them by flagging them down somewhere fairly central. Uber introduced competition which has massively improved all other taxi services. These days there's nothing special about Uber except its ubiquity so I don't care if it fails n…
In some ways it does though. Some industries corner the market through regulation. Ie it's impossible for a new competitor to start up that follows all the rules and it's that way by design. The only way to break into that market is to break the rules or buy out an existing business.
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++ taxi companies were corrupt due to the taxi medallion system.
As decided by the people. They could have politically campaigned to change that, buy out all the medallions at fair market price and the redistribute them for free in sufficient quantity.
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It will work out for them when/if they have destroyed the competition, that's the point. And in any case the founders are still billionaires.
This game is over. There is no way uber is getting a monopoly on taxi service. The popularity of uber has had the wrong effect: taxi companies are getting apps now, and other ridesharing companies are trying to get a piece of the action. There will not be a monopoly except in the places that are truly unprofitable to service.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You could just phone a cab, no? That's what I did anyway; it's less convenient than an app, but back in the day you didn't have mobile phones either so not much option really. I don't really see how an "app" is fundamentally all that different, and it's kind of an obvious thing to add once smartphones become popular. I agree that Uber injected some fresh energy in a somewhat complacent market, but the real "innovatio…
>You could just phone a cab, no? That's what I did anyway; it's less convenient than an app, [...] I don't really see how an "app" is fundamentally all that different, It's more than just a substitution of tapping an icon vs dialing a phone number. The Uber business model of non-medallion cars and geographic matching algorithm builds up a "distributed mesh" of drivers to serve passengers -- especially those who are n…
Isn’t it the same for Uber? They don’t get paid to get to your location so the only advantage as a driver is being picking up someone in the area you drop off another passenger. Dispatch worked similarly but it had its limitations of its time.
One thing that was not possible that Uber does is ride sharing.