Ok so Uber laid off 8% of the workforce. Apparently they haven't PIPed many people in recent years so this was supposed to be long overdue.
But the larger point I want to make and ask all you angry negative folks is - why tf are you against ride hailing? I personally want both Uber and Lyft to succeed. The taxi industry was doing a terrible job of meeting customer demand. Uber and Lyft have both made my life so much easier. It is not some social media app where I go to get likes. Many of us rely on these services regularly. I own a car and I still use Uber for many things. I would probably use it even if the prices went up by 10-15%. And guess what, so will all of you especially when you're travelling. Drivers are NOT regular full-time employees. This AB5 is an absurd socialist populist move by politicians. They should get adequate coverage but they certainly don't deserve full time benefits. I feel like all of this is just hate being spread against ride hailing by traditionalist and protectionist forces that want to keep the racket of taxis alive.
If you think taxi drivers weren't being exploited earlier, please go read about the corrupt NYC taxi medallion system which is a real disaster. Is being a slave to taxi companies and their labor unions a better alternative? Do you really think these taxi companies were in it for the drivers? Despite being contractors they now probably have better conditions, which doesn't mean Uber/Lyft can't do more for them.
Wake the f up folks, we're all consumers here . And ride hailing is real innovation using software.
Constructive comments appreciated. Trolls GTFO.
TC 210k
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Which is partly why I think we see the astronomical numbers given recent market run up.
Imo only
At the end of the day, I really don't think healthcare should be provided by employers at all. It should be completely free for everyone (subsidized by taxes, obviously) and provided by the government. Since we don't have that, we should compel employers to ensure it is provided.
So what happens now is mostly a show of force to remind other people what could happen if we fucked with each other.
This means proxy warfare, in poor ass countries like Syria, where a global super power like Russia will try to win influence by supporting the existing government, and another super power like the US will try to go topple the "tyrannical" government. Add in a few other big powers like Saudi and Iran, you've basically royally fucked the country into endless conflict that mostly harms the poor average person that had nothing to do with the conflict in the first place. And then without a clear winner, extremist groups like isis start to take over because hell, ain't nobody else doing anything.
Maybe it is. But why the fuck does the poor kid have to be the scape goat? He didn't do anything wrong, he was just in the wrong place at the wrong time, minding his own goddamn business digging sand in the sand bar and building sand structures with his own toys. The bully just went in and beat the living out of him to show everyone else how tough he is so no one else would mess with him or his friends ever again.
And sure, life isn't fair, we live in a world where the strong prey upon the weak and that's consistent across the animal kingdom. Maybe we don't have a better short term solution. But it's shitty
Second, the assumption above is that wars are necessary. Perhaps it is, just like capital punishment, as a tool to keep nations in line. But neither situations are good. At best, you can only say that it's the least shitty of two terrible options. To say that it's for the greater good is a mockery of the bleakness and tragedy of war.
I felt engineering gives one a moat, but Netflix is an example that's not true, and even though Lyft and Uber have invested a lot in building services and optimizing everything, building services is going to be easy for whoever has the resources to build self driving. Given how disloyal customers generally are (barring Uber haters), it'll be easy for a new comer with self driving to vertically integrate and build services.
There are many options for top talent in today's market and if you want the best product you need them.
Whether or not you actually find the right people and are able to execute is on leadership.
Comp is by far not their problem.
There are other points as well:
- The actual experience of requesting, waiting for, riding in an Uber, and instructing the driver how not to drive erratically/speed/miss directions or street signs is extremely unpleasant. No one actually likes the process. Ask people if they actually like it. Everyone likes being driven, but Uber requires quite a bit of effort, attention, and inconvenience just to make it happen (constant cancelled rides, frictional pickups, etc. not to mention you need battery, connectivity). It caters to a tech-savvy market: it must be super hard to use for non-tech people. I've seen many people start crying at the airport after not being able to get their Uber app to work or find their driver.
- As a "tech habit" Uber and Lyft are addicting and incredibly costly: SF residents often take Uber/Lyft to commute every day, adding up to $6k or so a year that are often regretted expenses.
- There are at least 8 other ways of getting to a destination. If you're drunk you can call a cab. Or maybe don't get drunk so often that you need to pay for a special service to take care of you.
- Uber/Lyft also cause horrendous traffic in urban areas and this is well-documented. Really, your service lets cars turn on their hazard lights and bring traffic to a standstill in the middle of a busy street just to pick someone up?
- I can't imagine how stressful it is to be a driver and deal with real aggression all day long from other drivers, and impatient passengers who can't find the pickup point. I'm not talking about people doing this to save up for their first house, I mean people who do this full-time to support their families while also doing night school. It seems like complete hell.
I don't understand the hate towards Uber employees here on blind. Why?
Don't paint most of us with a broad brush. 😀
And your grief is against TK, what about Uber the company and ride hailing? You want Lyft to tumble too?
Uber and Lyft don't fit in here.
1. A lot of Uber drivers bought new cars to just do Uber full time. They have monthly payments so they have no option but to make money even if it means driving more and more hours. When they did that, Uber was paying them good money but now they have been severely cutting their cut. It's not like Uber didn't mandated clean cars and not like it didn't benefit from it. So you guys should have realized sometime ago and discouraged this behavior but instead you guys gamified the app to make the drivers drive more and more. This is all very well documented in the articles by New York times done about gamification of the app.
2. It's not an obsession per say but Ubers management behavior has been that of a typical "Bro" aka it's all about you guys. The open flouting of new law and saying that drivers are not core to the business is one e.g.
Anyways, I don't believe anything at the company is going the change because changing business would mean the valuation would be cut to pennies and no management is going to do that.
And lastly, have some empathy for people especially the ones who survive on a weekly paycheck, they are much worse then us who make six figure salaries.
Idiot, how will those people like it if Uber and Lyft completely shut down due to no profitability eh? You will then demand unemployment benefits for them to be taken as a % of our paychecks?
How's about the working students who can only drive on the weekend? The retired part timers? The consumers who will be forced to pay more for their rides? Any empathy for them too?
I personally do not think these companies do well without mature self driving tech. At least not at the scale they operate at currently.
Another suggestion - if you label people who are asking for fair treatment as socialists, it exposes your (severe) biases and don’t help your case. If you want a healthy discussion, that’s not the way to go about it.
Your claim that most of them are fulltime is the only bullshit. If 50% of all Uber drivers drive for more than 40 hours per week, that would add up to 2x the total driving hours of the whole US population. Do you realize how stupid you sound now?
OP you are using logic, do you think left uses logic?
So many people will be jobless if Uber/Lyft announces no business in California for even a month. And no, a competitor will not emerge, it's costly business & compliance is costly & consumers will be stuck with expensive taxis or crappy BART or no Public transport.
Capitalists are always looking to reduce their labor costs so they can pocket more money. When they succeed in doing so, prices drop for consumers, but so do wages for workers. Think Walmart employees making shit wages buying cheap products.
Companies like Uber and Lyft provide a technology whose primary feature is allowing capitalists to reduce their labor costs. In other words, turning generally well-paid, even unionized taxi drivers into low cost freelancers. Convenience for consumers is what they point to to justify what is primarily a transfer of bargaining power and wealth from drivers to the capitalists who own the platform. It’s the same as the Walmart thing.
The other thing that’s more unique to Uber is that they are actually unable to turn a profit. They are trying the Amazon strategy of burning an unfathomable amount of capital to keep prices so low that they undercut the competition and put their competitors out of business, becoming a monopoly, at which point they will have the leverage to raise prices and lower wages enough to become profitable. This strategy is unlikely to succeed for many reasons, but the cracks are starting to show and it will probably collapse sometime in the next few years if I had to guess.
Here’s a detailed look at Uber’s case if you want to learn more: https://americanaffairsjournal.org/2019/05/ubers-path-of-destruction/
The idea of “The Union” being some corrupting outside force is a distortion that management works hard to spread. Management tries to corrupt union leadership, then points to the corruption that they created as proof that unions are bad. Like all propaganda it’s less about outright lying (unions can be corrupt) and more about placing emphasis in such a way that responds to their benefit. All statistics show that union membership is enormously beneficial to workers in the entire industry, not just the unionized shops, if you want to get empirical.
The last thing management wants is to have to negotiate with workers as equals. Much better to keep bargaining at the individual level where the worker has almost no power.
Sure, but the right way to solve this problem is not to legislate paying workers more, which creates insane market inefficiencies with all kinds of nth order effects that most politicians don’t even attempt to foresee, but rather to create a system where people who are willing to work hard have opportunities to re-skill or up-skill and move into higher-productivity/higher-wage jobs.
This is why I strongly support Andrew Yang. He realizes all these advancements are adding more values to our economy, with less people. And this is good. But millions of people are being left behind. We need to provide UBI so they can pick themselves up all the while supporting their local economy.
I am also excited about more applications of ISAs. There is no reason these have to be limited to programming schools. There all kinds of applications in trades and other areas for which there are labor shortages. We may be able to fund living expenses while training people in those areas, helping them find jobs afterwards as well. All of this with aligned incentives too, assuming these new schools continue to bear the risk of their graduates finding jobs, unlike our current education loan system.
The entire model was supposed to be a side gig to make extra money or to make some cash when you drive accross town. I'll turn on Lyft and put in a one way destination and pick up one or two people on the way if I'm driving downtown and make 10-15 bucks and do the same thing on the ride home and if I'm bored on a weekend day I'll drive for a few hours. That's the entire model of how it's supposed to work.
Tldr; if you are using Uber and Lyft as a replacement for a full time job then you are the one in the wrong not them.
they are both dishonest exploiting people in need to make extra cash to meet ends. even with exploutation they are still unable to make money muahahaha
A good way to think about it:
Early Days of ridesharing — driving as a side hobby / extra cash; no full time expectations
Hypergrowth and ridesharing wars — price slashing and surge experiments that would hurt the driver’s end pay, campaigns encouraging full time exclusive driving and making the drivers seem like full time employees, intense rating rules on drivers (at one point drivers had to keep driving and sustain a rating about 4.8 or 4.9 for either company), lobbyist campaigns that would be against driver’s interests but written as if in driver’s interests
Now:
Because of the war, the IPOs, and the politics, with the full time (40+ hr a week) driving pressures, it’s fair for the drivers to make the asks. I think it would be better if Uber and Lyft offered two types of driver employment — full time and committed with benefits vs. hobbyist/casual drivers
Also, I used to be a heavy Uber user but then I started taking public transportation and now I take maybe one Uber a month when I go out for night of drinking.
This socialist argument of dysfunctional state is utter Bullshit. The things you listed is given to everyone in Sweden, but hey they have a thriving economy as well as a thriving tech sector.
Idk in my travels across the world. Places like Europe have the US beat in most metrics. I find the people who have a lot to say are operating off of articles and not the personal experience of living in “socialistic states”
Look at it simply; the time it takes for a ride, the milage, and the uplift that the company has on the final cost. Let's say you have a 10 mile ride, by Fed Regs, that's about $5. Average speedlimit on city streets is about 35mph, so between 17 and 18 minutes, go with about $4.30 then. So $9.30 before uplift from the company for overhead/profit. From the construction industry, that woild be about $0.93 for overhead, and about $2.60 for profit. About $13.03 total. Reasonable.
It's when companies start trying to mark up their OH/Profit to levels about 50% of what they are producing, where trouble happens and the hate begins.
Flagged by the community.
I haven't given them $1. Lyft all the way.
Uber dashcam footage shows lead up to fatal self-driving crash - YouTube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RASBcc4yOOo
Fuck Uber.
1) They don’t pay (or didn’t pay before) certain taxes which taxi companies paid.
2) if they claim they are a platform, then their commission (20% or 25%) per ride should be off a base price, not off the surge price as well. Say on Christmas there is an extra demand for Uber drivers, not for the platform.
3) if the drivers are independent contractors or that they are also the customers as the companies claim, then the drivers should be able to set the price and also know the destination when the rider requests a ride. But currently Uber sets the price and the ride is assigned to the driver like a task being assigned to an employee at work.
So after all it is a clean behavior from Uber and Lyft as well.
And I think govt should have regulated these stuff, not go populist
These posters never look at the driver side of the equation
It’s pretty fucked up to discriminate a person over dogs and treat him lower than that. Shame on the employees who support their fucked up work environment.
Edit: this is not about service dogs. I consider this fucked up because society has agreed that we do not discriminate on race, gender, religion, disability, etc. When you can cause an asthma attack, that person is legally disabled as you probably would consider yourself disabled by not being able to breath. A dog at work policy is fucked because it’s discrimination and harm. If you support equal opportunity, why would you support a practice that prevents people from working at a place when it’s not based in qualifications but a biological trait? Now a person below calls it culture or lifestyle but how is this different from supporting discrimination on women or a person of a certain color...except you can kill the person too...
2nd hand smoke is a workplace safety thing. Arguably dogs and asthmatics with allergies are too... and not allowing dogs for people with PTSD (I know some keep pointing out this is not about service dogs but they are just as allergy causing, so that is not relevant) . Arguably strobe lights are another for epileptics or migraine sufferers. The list goes on. It is a judgement call of how much a company should bend to accommodate an employee. That is why “reasonable accommodations” is sometimes decided in a court by a judge, of which none of us are.
If you don't like Uber pay, don't drive Uber. Get a REAL job.
People leave their FT time, drive Uber and complain about pay, hypocrisy. It's called gig for a reason
In both cases -
1. They can't find job - Uber/Lyft are savior.
2. Uber drivers working much & are compensated enough. In this case also Uber is good. At least in SF, I have heard some drivers tell me they make 8-9k a month. Let's be honest here, that's a lot for just driving a car without any degree.
I would be more angry on Uber if they earn billions and don't pay well. Company is losing billions & consumers and drivers both are happy.