There's a kind of dance that happens in arguments about the post office where somebody points out that the USPS is actually profitable, absent its pension obligations, and then somebody else responds that, yeah, but they actually do have those pension obligations, so you can't erase them from the profitability calculation, but then somebody else argues that, sure, but the point is that it's not critical to the functioning of a mail delivery service that they have so many pension obligations and the point is that such a service could very well be profitable, so it's a little silly to say, "the USPS can't be profitable" when what you mean is that any organization similarly saddled with historical pension obligations couldn't be profitable. You're not really saying anything interesting about mail delivery, in other words.

I feel like there's something similar happening here. It seems fairly clear that Uber's currently structured around burning a bunch of money, but...burning that money isn't critical to the functioning of a rideshare business.

People are just kind of talking past one another on this, I think.