Leaving any motorcycle safety conversations aside, I think Uber has been the sacrificial jerk of the rideshare industry. Lyft probably would have attracted some of the same issues if there hadn't been someone more brash and more willing to flout their law breaking ahead of them.
Now Uber's explosive expansion and the resultant "they're gonna do it anyway, may as well accommodate 'em" reaction of the regulators has more or less normalized the good parts of the rideshare industry. Lyft and perhaps other competitors-to-be can benefit without taking nearly as much flak. Hopefully you're right in terms of the ability to provide a much bigger net positive in that situation.
Uber is the pace car and the police pulled him over, Lyft saw this and applied their brakes.
And no, we don't use horses anymore.
Leaving aside broader questions, I think we can take a guess at what happens after Uber gets pulled over. Someone will take their place. What soneca said above makes reasonable sense.
OTOH, I'm not sure how useful this culture of rebuke and scolding really is. I think it's a bit extreme to wish for regular corporate collapse because of scandal. Reform needs to be an option here. Then again, maybe an occasional sacrificial lamb is good for making the other lambs ride slower. If it doesn't really matter who it is, may as well be the jerk.
*Smokey (as in the bear) being CB slang for highway police due to the hats.
See: http://freakonomics.com/podcast/uber-economists-dream/ or http://www.nber.org/papers/w22627.
> So we found that in 2015, if you extrapolate to the whole U.S., we found that the overall consumer surplus added up to almost $7 billion. So people spent about $4 billion on Ubers, but they actually would have been willing to spend about $11 billion. So for every dollar people spent on Uber, they got about $1.50 worth of extra joy that they would have been willing to pay on average above and beyond what they did pay. And to put it in a context just how big this consumer surplus is, the total amount of money that went to what Uber calls the driver partners, the people who are driving the cars, was something like $2.5 billion. So the consumers got more than twice the benefit of all the money that went to the drivers. And Uber itself only got to keep about $1 billion.
Of course, none of this makes Uber immune to criticism for the way they operate as a company. And there are sufficiently many alternatives that, even without Uber, society is likely to continue reaping benefits from ride-sharing as a technology.
Note that it doesn't follow that Uber would make more money simply by raising prices -- consumer surplus measures the amount Uber could make by charging each user their "true" value, but if Uber simply raised prices, then they would lose demand.
However, Uber is actually starting to use price discrimination (i.e., charge different users different prices based on their characteristics), which would eliminate consumer surplus [1].
[1] http://www.business-standard.com/article/companies/uber-s-ne...
If Uber raised their prices, the average real value would drop from its current real value of $2/hr, to...
Hell if I know, but it could well be negative.
Yesterday, Uber co-founder Garrett Camp wrote "Uber has become a global service providing roughly 15 million rides per day across 500 cities" at https://medium.com/@gc/ubers-path-forward-b59ec9bd4ef6
The most recent estimate I could find on Didi Chuxing is 20 million rides per day as of October, 2016 as stated at https://www.techinasia.com/china-didi-chuxing-20-million-dai...
It's reasonable to assume that Didi has noticeably grown since October 2016, but none of these numbers are easily verifiable externally to these companies.
(Lyft's market share is unclear to me, but perhaps 2 million rides per day, more or less?)
It was apparent that Didi had achieved the network effects necessary to overcome Uber in volume. Both companies wanted to focus on revenue so it was savvy of Didi to purchase UberChina so they could reduce ride subsidies.
I think that the success of UberChina, along with Yum! and Wal-Mart, demonstrate that it is possible to prevail in the difficult Chinese market.
What were the differences?
It was used as an example to illustrate that Didi did the little things that remove friction for its customers. Didi also recruited drivers in smaller cities; its coverage was superior to UberChina's.
It seems to me that to be successful in certain countries requires skills that don't translate internationally - for example, understanding the quirks of one big country, or negotiating the political situation.
And this is again a failure of government, not capitalism. As an analogue, you cannot say that socialism is a flawed system purely because of what happened in russia-you must not mix up economic and political philosophies.
And on the contrary, I absolutely do hold the failure of the Soviet system against central planning and command economies, even socialist ones. Given that, I find democratically-executed socialism using markets for prices (some consider this market socialism) much preferable.
Telecom monopolies are not by government intent by rather by regulatory capture.
As a capitalist, I hella want to exclude others from the market. If I can get the government to do this for me, then I'm willing to pay the lobbyist fees to make that happen. In the IP space the only reason I'm willing to slave away at invention is the possibility of a patent, a right to exclude, a limited monopoly.
As a capitalist, the absolute last thing I want is a free market. Thiel puts it this way: competition is for losers.
On the other hand, software patents.
We have generally forbidden dumping barrels of spent oil in rivers, for example.
Likewise, a non-capitalistic system can forbid or not pollution.
http://www.sandman.com/images/oldpolewires1sm.jpg
They were government regulated until that didn't work, then broken up. After the subsequent deregulation, the monopoly is in the process of re-creating itself now.
So you are saying that the investors, i.e. the capital, pressured Kalanick out for reasons of profit rather than due to pressure by the state in the form of multiple lawsuits. You are mistaken.
In particular, there is no evidence that Uber's naughty bro culture is any less profitable than a mature egalitarian culture. Lack of profit wasn't why Kalanick was shown the door.
The Waymo lawsuit is still very much up in the air. Kalanick's involvement is already public: he collaborated with Levandowski to acquire a team of self-driving-car engineers and their work over 8 months. The key demands of the Waymo legal team were rejected in their injunction. Judge Alsop did not see a clear nexus between the Waymo designs and the Uber lidar, referring the matter to trial.
Based on what? Uber isn't public, they aren't forced to release any information on their ride sharing, and what info they do release isn't subjected to any real verification.
The only article I see is based on "number of app downloads" - that has literally no relevance in the number of rides they're servicing. I've got Uber on my phone and I haven't used it in 3 months and I don't see that changing anytime soon. They didn't lose me outright as a user, but they, for all intents and purposes, lost my business.
Did the courts say that Kalanick is barred from being the CEO of Uber? Or, is it the case that Kalanick's actions have put Uber at risk fines and further litagation?
My (admittedly uninformed) take on the situation is that Uber's investors weighed the costs and benefits and determined that Kalanick needed to go. While the regulatory environment probably influenced the decision, it wasn't the government calling the shots.
Capitalism by itself looks at profit. In the United States capitalism is held in check by a legal+political+free speech system. A company (Uber) is not held in check by more capitalism; it is not held in check by competition. As an aside, this breaks down with regulatory capture.
When VW cheated on its emissions testing it was not checked by a more efficient and competitive Tesla. It was held to account by a legal system external of capitalism.
And Travis was not held accountable by a legal system - his investors (i.e. capital) asked him to step down.
I think we're all saying the same thing, it's just your conclusion is incorrect.
Capitalism is about future profits, by definition. I can't invest money in Apple in 1997. I have to invest it today, and my only concern is what happens after that investment. The Uber boarding kicking him out is entirely a capitalist reason. They've invested money, and his presence will (they believe at least) negatively affect the return on that investment going forward.
Your only concern may be what happens after an investment but you'd be foolhardy not to take past performance into account. Undervalued (Apple in 1997, return of Steve) is one thing. Throwing good money after bad is another.
$2.8B is just a ton of money to lose and for a startup it's insane (thinking of Amazon but Uber's losses dwarf Amazon's early losses). Frankly, I think the board is using this as an excuse to do now what they should have done a couple of years back. Boards are human. They aren't homo economicus incarnate. Ascribing rationality to the outcome of a board meeting because capitalism makes no sense. Really, they lost $2.8B last year.
No one is suggesting that. When people say "this is capitalist of the board to do" they're talking about the individual board member profiting from a successful exit. Put more simply - investor puts $1 in Uber on day 0 and expects to make $100 on day 1,000 and makes a $99 profit. They're axing TK because they want to make their $99 return on investment.
Which reason would that be? Which reason is there for a investor to ask a CEO to step other than to protect his/her investment?
By allowing it to willfully break laws in dozens of countries, contributing to lowering standards of living and high stress at work, tracking users at all times, having a hostile workplace, then becoming the most important provider of such services in the world?
Yeah, that's totally capitalism doing its work, and not the painfully obvious "throw VC money at it until it works" scheme, right
As a previous comment pointed out, Uber created a consumer surplus of almost $7 billion in 2015 alone.
I really don't think they could've broke into the market by asking politely; it took some fire in the belly. However, the side effects are pretty devastating as well.
So you're basically saying that stuff like treating women like shit was NECESSARY to provide a good "taxi" service?
None the less, let's not pretend yellow cab other taxi livery companies never mistreated any of their employees (male, female, lgbtq, etc.)
Mistreatment is not an uber only specialty.
Users got a better experience from Uber, but it's not clear it was at the expense of the service side of the population being treated worse than they were treated by the incumbents, therefore all other things being equal Uber would still be a net positive.
The alternative isn't the legacy system, which nobody's saying is better. The alternative is an Uber with decency (even if still bold to break into regulated markets). Or an Uber competitor.
They broke into markets with disregard for the law, often it backfired, often it didn't.
Allegedly(as it is being investigated) they also "stole" IP from Alphabet in an attempt to get ahead in the self-driving gold rush.
They repeatedly ignored several sexual harassment reports in order to protect someone who they referred to as a "high performer", in the name of growth, they could not afford to lose a high performer.
In the startup/VC/unicorn hype world growth is king, it comes before profit, revenue, employee wellbeing, customer satisfaction, business and work ethics.
Uber is not the first guilty of this, it's just the extreme case.
There are many entrenched, incumbent interests that try to make money not through healthy wealth creation but by trying to appropriate wealth through politics (e.g., granted monopolies) which to some degree the taxi industry was.
Uber and its competitors did a great service to many people and ultimately really angered monopolistic incumbents.
No, but its possible they were two facets of the same quality. While the aggressive, see-what-we-can-get-away-with attitude is useful (and probably necessary) in fighting the entrenched local monopolists who have local government protecting their vested interests, it turns out to be a serious liability with respect to workplace norms and stealing of trade secrets.
its also revealing that you would even bother entertaining this idea. why not just say "yea. they shouldn't do that."? im pretty sure there are companies that have "disrupted" industries that were not filled with toxic culture.
In other words you're here to scold me.
> it shows a need to explain a bad thing by saying that a good thing caused it.
It does no such thing. It explains the nuance of someone else's argument which I thought was being misconstrued. That is, a thing can have positive and negative aspects.
> while i wont deal with the substance of the argument (which i personally reject), its my experience that this argument's format shows up an awful lot when there is a bias that someone has to bend reality to preserve.
Huh? That is to say "I will ignore your argument (but dismiss it) and jump ahead and make value judgements about your motivation and biases."
> its also revealing that you would even bother entertaining this idea. why not just say "yea. they shouldn't do that."? im pretty sure there are companies that have "disrupted" industries that were not filled with toxic culture.
What I find revealing (and amusing) is that you admit you are ignoring the plain meaning of my post, but prefer to look for thoughtcrimes in the subtext.
I think it's a good think to break down monopolies and open up competition.
What's even the point here? You're aware that no one has to protest a company they don't know or use. And that "you can't protest one if you don't protest all of them" is a fallacy.
Uber final product is good for society. And other companies can provide the same product (in my city, São Paulo, there are other 3 good companies in the same space).
Uber practices as a company are toxic for its employees and some of the toxicity leak to society.
If such calculation was possible, I believe it would show a net positive impact in society. But a company with good practices and the same product would have an even larger net positive impact.
As a society, I believe we should not settle for bad companies making good products, that's why I believe all the protests are legit.