231–240 of 556 posts
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It's probably a side gig, which is amazing. It means taxi didn't need to be a job all along.
Amazing for whom? Certainly not for the gig workers who don’t get employee benefits and are now sometimes making sub-minimum wage after accounting for gas and deprecation
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I think stakeholders , not shareholders, was intentional. Stakeholders (users, advertisers, whatever) might not be well served by a lack of edit button or whatever, but that’s only very tenuously connected to company value. Shareholders care that they make their pennies of course. That seems to be (part of) the observation. (Which as you say isn’t earth shattering but still worth remembering when you start wondering…
>Shareholders care that they make their pennies of course. That seems to be (part of) the observation. I don't get it. The point of a company is to make money for its shareholders. This has been the case forever now, and certainly isn't caused by "financialised logic". I'd be interested to hear what the "rules of traditional business" (which presumably says that the point of a company isn't to make money for its shar…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nGbJYk-x1sc
It took me a while to seek to my mental pointer to this.
Wendy Brown is brilliant. But some caveats to try to encourage people to stay with it; The video is long. It's dry and academic. She's a classic leftie. The "business" under discussion is education.
But hidden within this is one of the most cogent explanations of financialised decorrelation of social and monetary values. (Brown's other writing on political science is also brilliant and worth the effort regardless of your actual personal political position.)
My key takeaways: 1. Uber is actually a higher cost/less efficient producer of urban car services than the taxi companies it has driven out of business 2. Individual Uber drivers with limited capital cannot acquire, finance, maintain and insure vehicles more economically than Yellow Cab 3. Expenses other than drivers, vehicles, and fuel account for 15 percent of traditional taxi costs but Uber charges drivers 25-30 p…
Nice summary. A thought on point #2: (from a total costs perspective) is this still true considering yellow cab drivers still need to acquire, maintain, and insure their personal use vehicle?
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>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…
> They're not turning a profit now Uber turned a profit in 2021Q2. [0] Twitter now has had many profitable quarters. [1] Of course, cumulatively, they are both money-losing, but I think the perception of these businesses as only having a 'plausibility' of making money is perhaps dated. [0] https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/UBER/uber-technolo... [1] https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/TWTR/twitter/net-i.…
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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
Do people actually claim Uber is a successful business? In the UK, none of the original companies that built the railroads still exist. Many of the railway companies were never particularly profitable and the railway boom was a stock market bubble. Lots of them were fraudulent or poorly run. Eventually they all either went out of business, or amalgamated and ultimately got nationalised. Nevertheless, they proved the…
An interesting perspective, but I think the key difference is that Uber has built no lasting infrastructure. I do agree that Uber has improved the taxi/private vehicle transport industry in essentially every market it entered. In London (UK) for example, taxis were previously mainly used by tourists, the rich, or the very drunk. Uber changed this completely, making it accessible for many more people. If Uber disappea…
Feels to me like there's some pretty big leaps being made in the assertions. Just one example: >Taxi demand is sociologically bipolar; 35 percent of users have incomes over $100,000 and 55 percent have incomes under $40,000. Thus, on Saturday night wealthier people out for a night on the town compete for service with night shift workers who do not have transit options. Huge non-sequitur. It seems to be a reasonable a…
If my old Ford with 150K+ miles got to the point where it wasn’t worth getting fixed, I wouldn’t buy another car. I did without a car for a year when I gave my car to my older son who doesn’t live with us. I work remotely. When I needed to go some place local, I would take Uber often. I rented a car for a weekend every three months to go home to see my parents,
I had groceries delivered. Admittedly we did have one car. But my wife was usually busy during the day. I see no purpose for having a car just to sit in the garage most of the time. Uber is cheaper.
My key takeaways: 1. Uber is actually a higher cost/less efficient producer of urban car services than the taxi companies it has driven out of business 2. Individual Uber drivers with limited capital cannot acquire, finance, maintain and insure vehicles more economically than Yellow Cab 3. Expenses other than drivers, vehicles, and fuel account for 15 percent of traditional taxi costs but Uber charges drivers 25-30 p…
I don't disagree with your points but let me give you some counterpoints: 1. Taxi services are balkanized; 2. Many tax services don't allow you to order a taxi ahead of time. You have to flag one down (eg NYC). For ordering a car, you need to otherwise deal with an (expensive) car service; 3. Uber made the payment process seamless and I cannot overstate how important this is as a user. I hate dealing with NYC yellow…
This cannot be understated. Also, as an introvert, negotiating with drivers, especially those that don't drive by the meter was always stressful, I mostly ended up overpaying.