News for hackers. Stuff that matters.
Re:Can Uber ever make money? by cabaalis on Friday April 26, 2019 @05:54PM (#19762103)
> drivers often don't know the neighborhood and rely exclusively on GPS

I drove for Uber about 3 years ago for a couple of months when getting my consultancy off the ground, which led to my current gig.

If I had a way to tell Uber "Don't give me rides that require me to leave a given geofence--we'll all have a bad time." Then I'd have been much, much happier. Everyone wanted a ride from my suburban town to the metro area that I know nothing about. Every now and then I'd get one where start point and endpoint were both my own town.

I'd have happily taken less fares in order to drive more familiar streets, and the people who rode with me would have enjoyed it more.

Re:Can Uber ever make money? by kelnos on Friday April 26, 2019 @06:14PM (#19762222)
The problem there is twofold:

1) Many drivers from your town would likely geofence themselves to your town, reducing the supply of drivers that will drive to the metro area, increasing wait times and driving up prices, making riders unhappy.

2) Drivers would use this feature to avoid driving to "bad" parts of town, making transportation discriminatory. (In ways that are illegal for traditional taxi companies, so Uber would eventually run afoul of the same regulations.)

It's a shame because there are reasonable use cases for a geofencing feature (you seem to certainly be one of them), but it can be easily abused and can hurt the rider experience depending on locale. (Not saying the rider experience is inherently more important, but certainly Uber/Lyft would see it that way.)

Re:Can Uber ever make money? by cabaalis on Friday April 26, 2019 @07:15PM (#19762592)
For #1, it seems the market would adjust. We already see complaints about drivers not knowing the area they're driving in. Would it reassure riders to know that their driver spends 99% of driving time in an area they're riding?

For #2, sincere problem for which I am not aware of a good solution.

Re:Can Uber ever make money? by kelnos on Saturday April 27, 2019 @07:48AM (#19765067)
Not if there aren't enough drivers there, period. I'd much rather a driver unfamiliar with my city who needs Google Maps to get me to my destination if the alternative is I have to wait 20 minutes for a car.
Re:Can Uber ever make money? by LifeLiverTransp on Saturday April 27, 2019 @10:37AM (#19765744)
You could also allow for auto-handshakes, drivers who prefer to drive only within a radius handing over there passenger to another driver in transit.
Re:Can Uber ever make money? by repolfx on Saturday April 27, 2019 @11:43AM (#19766063)
Solution is to repeal the laws that make driving non-discriminatory. It'd be painful in the short run but ultimately a place being so bad cabbies won't drive there is a signal there is a serious need for other forms of intervention, probably by policing changes. Wallpapering over the symptoms may relieve short term pressure but is no long term solution.
Re:Can Uber ever make money? by Simon_says on Friday April 26, 2019 @07:18PM (#19762608)
Yes, this is how supply and demand works in a healthy market. Riders should pay higher prices for tasks that drivers are less willing to do, and concomitantly drivers should get paid more for those tasks.
Re:Can Uber ever make money? by geofft on Saturday April 27, 2019 @12:41AM (#19763817)
That's a "healthy" market in the sense of a liquid market with high levels of information communication. That's not necessarily the same thing as a "healthy" market in the sense of good public policy. For instance, very few people would say that a "healthy" labor market has no minimum wage or discrimination protections, trusting supply and demand to solve those adequately. Similarly, letting the market price trips to "bad" neighborhoods higher is probably undesirable, even if that's what a free market would do.

It also may not be the same thing as a market customers understand and feel comfortable participating in. It's true that there's more demand for unblemished produce priced the same as misshapen ones, but I'd be very unlikely to patronize a grocery store that ran an auction for each individual vegetable. So it might be in Uber's interest to not expose a variable-pricing mechanism. (Indeed, customers already seem not thrilled with surge pricing, even though it arguably gets them the service they want more efficiently.)

Re:Can Uber ever make money? by Simon_says on Saturday April 27, 2019 @02:38AM (#19764173)
> very few people would say that a "healthy" labor market has no minimum wage or discrimination protections ...

Unfortunately, you're talking to one of those few people. I'm against government mandating minimum wages or mandatory maternity/paternity leave. If you want those things, you can try to negotiate for it.

> customers already seem not thrilled with surge pricing

This is a true statement, but I wonder about these people. I don't share their view.

Re:Can Uber ever make money? by TheSpiceIsLife on Saturday April 27, 2019 @05:42AM (#19764727)
Government mandate minimum wages and mandatory parental leave are the result of people having negotiated for them.
Re:Can Uber ever make money? by Simon_says on Sunday April 28, 2019 @05:20AM (#19770161)
It's a strange negotiation that prevents me from entering into another contract with a third party ...
Re:Can Uber ever make money? by infinite8s on Sunday April 28, 2019 @12:41PM (#19772091)
You can - move to a country that doesn't provide those.
Re:Can Uber ever make money? by Simon_says on Friday May 03, 2019 @06:26AM (#19817067)
You can move to a country that does.
Re:Can Uber ever make money? by lotsofpulp on Saturday April 27, 2019 @07:53AM (#19765077)
Negotiating for everything is not the most efficient way of conducting business for society as a whole. Negotiating offers the benefit of price discovery, but it also consumes resources in the form of opportunity cost with other things that could have been done with that time and effort.

Yes, we can expose the reality that most people aren't economically worth enough right now to demand parental leave or living conditions, but what is the benefit of exposing that?

It's not like figuring out the true price of a product is low because it's low quality, so if people stop buying it then the producer will stop making it. The people that aren't worth enough, whether it be because they are lazy, stupid, came across an illness, born into a poor family and never had the opportunity and mentors to teach them, should we just let them rot away?

Re:Can Uber ever make money? by Simon_says on Sunday April 28, 2019 @05:28AM (#19770184)
> Yes, we can expose the reality that most people aren't economically worth enough right now to demand parental leave or living conditions, but what is the benefit of exposing that?

The benefit would be discouraging people from having kids they can't afford and not forcing employers to pay employees who aren't working.

If you want to get paid for work you're not doing, you should at least have a conversation with your employer about it.

You bring up an interesting point about efficiency, and regarding most other things, I would agree with you, but your employment is one of the most important things in your life, so it's worthwhile to do the work to understand your contract.

Re:Can Uber ever make money? by geofft on Sunday April 28, 2019 @08:45AM (#19770848)
If biological entities whose entire purpose is to have kids can't afford to have kids, that's an indictment of the system that charges so much to have kids, not of the organisms fulfilling their biological imperative.
Re:Can Uber ever make money? by TheSpiceIsLife on Sunday April 28, 2019 @06:13AM (#19770305)
The benefit would be discouraging people from having kids they can't afford

Perhaps you haven't noticed, but all the evidence would suggest that that isn't working. You can't just not pay people and they magically stop fucking.

Rather, the framework is broken. When we hyper-individualise everything, we end up with a world people can come to frame thoughts like the one you've expressed.

A world where everyone must own one of everything, and a spare, in order to survive. Where betterment is defined as having more and better things to throw in the garbage heap.

So that future archeologists may dig up our society and find the last of the great cetaceans, beached, with their bellies full of custom gift cards with your face printed on it.

And that is a sad state of affairs.

The more educated people are the fewer children they have. And we continue to price more and more people out of education because they lost the birth lottery.

Re:Can Uber ever make money? by URSpider94 on Saturday April 27, 2019 @03:10AM (#19764272)
Here are a couple of replies: 1. As a society, we don’t allow people to discriminate against protected classes in commerce. Most of those “bad” neighborhoods are actually not bad, they are just populated by people of different race or social status. 2. Unregulated auctions work well when there is symmetry of information and negotiating power. That is not the case when I’m standing on a street corner trying to get home.
Re:Can Uber ever make money? by rightbyte on Saturday April 27, 2019 @07:39AM (#19765037)
It's way too much to ask a driver to risk driving in some gang land area or pick up riders that in way too many cases are violent criminals.

If you pick up random strangers in "bad" neighborhoods as a private person you are insane. Somehow taxi drivers are bad persons when they don't.

Do these things full time you will sooner or later get in trouble.

Going after drivers is going for the symptoms rather than the cause and quite selfish. If I wouldn't do it myself I don't want anyone else being forced because they have lower income than me.

Re:Can Uber ever make money? by swordsmith on Monday April 29, 2019 @12:11PM (#19779655)
I think you are a bit sheltered about what "bad" neighborhoods can be like
Re:Can Uber ever make money? by rossenberg79 on Friday April 26, 2019 @09:18PM (#19763128)
Having to do fares in the bad part of town is the reason my brother carries a loaded gun under his seat while driving for Uber.
Re:Can Uber ever make money? by fwip on Friday April 26, 2019 @10:25PM (#19763389)
Bringing a loaded gun with you is a good way to end up dead.
Re:Can Uber ever make money? by LifeLiverTransp on Saturday April 27, 2019 @10:40AM (#19765758)
Yes, but the criminal always has first draw, first action. Unless the criminal is a bad shot or otherwise unlucky, you just escalate a situation in which you are already on the losing end of a stick.

Just explain to me the game theory plus of a main-street battle, where the bad guy already holds you at gun point- and you have the chance to accelerate towards the bitter end?

Re:Can Uber ever make money? by plankers on Friday May 03, 2019 @12:57AM (#19815712)
And if the criminal doesn't have a gun, crime averted. Pretty useful, I'd say.
Re:Can Uber ever make money? by plankers on Saturday April 27, 2019 @07:23AM (#19764983)
Well it's not very useful without the bullets.
Re:Can Uber ever make money? by giancarlostoro on Saturday April 27, 2019 @03:55PM (#19767312)
It all depends on what the situation is. Some people get mugged by people without weapons or who only have a knife or are bluffing about having a gun. But yeah I wouldnt have it somewhere I couldnt reach for the gun immediately.
Re:Can Uber ever make money? by yspeak on Saturday April 27, 2019 @12:20AM (#19763759)
What how does that work logically or in reality ? Good guy has no gun, bad guy does, 100% good guy gets robbed, raped, kidnapped, or killed. Good guy has gun, bad guy runs away most of time or sometimes gets killed or captured or otherwise stopped some of time, or sometimes robs, rapes, or kills good guy despite good guy gun some of time. 100% of time I like the second scenario.

"Studies that directly assessed the effect of actual defensive uses of guns (i.e., incidents in which a gun was 'used' by the crime victim in the sense of attacking or threatening an offender) have found consistently lower injury rates among gun-using crime victims compared with victims who used other self-protective strategies. ... Almost all national survey estimates indicate that defensive gun uses by victims are at least as common as offensive uses by criminals, with estimates of annual uses ranging from about 500,000 to more than 3 million per year, in the context of about 300,000 violent crimes involving firearms in 2008."cdc see https://www.investors.com/politics/columnists/how-many-lives...

Re:Can Uber ever make money? by kelnos on Saturday April 27, 2019 @07:50AM (#19765071)
I'm going to guess that if someone in a bad part of town is pulling a gun or even a knife on your brother, they're not going to just lazily stand there staring at him as he fumbles to find a gun under his seat to defend himself.
Re:Can Uber ever make money? by ape4 on Friday April 26, 2019 @06:22PM (#19762275)
It's odd that this still isn't available. If you just want to drive for Uber for a couple hours you don't want to be taken to the other side of town
Re:Can Uber ever make money? by MuffinFlavored on Saturday April 27, 2019 @06:27PM (#19768015)
How profitable is "just driving Uber for a couple of hours"?
Re:Can Uber ever make money? by c0vfefe on Monday April 29, 2019 @01:01PM (#19780174)
Not speaking from experience, but the earnings seem relatively linear. Two hours a week would tend towards the thirty hrs/wk hourly rate, I'd think.