I want to push back on calling Uber's methods to avoiding regulations to be unethical, separately from discussing the wages. When they were starting, taxis had regulatory capture with their de facto monopoly. Lobbying over many decades prevented fair and healthy competition for out-of-date reasoning (like medallions and landmark tests). To break this corruption required illegal (and gray area) techniques, but I don't think it's unethical to destroy something that is unethical itself. Not all positive change can happen from following all the laws. Had they gotten shut down in the beginning, I think that would have been a major societal negative, and other ride-share companies coming on their coattails would not have happened.
Nope. Uber doesn't get a pass.
Uber could have confined themselves to the secondary cities with terrible cab service. Basically that's any city in the US other than New York and Chicago. People would (and some did!) have greeted them like liberators. For example, taxi service in Las Vegas was horrible until ridesharing showed up. San Diego taxis to the airport never showed up on time before ridesharing. etc.
Had Uber built up a commanding service in these secondary cities, they would have had all the momentum they needed to run over the incumbents in New York legally.
But, no, Uber decided they couldn't simply be a profitable business. Oh, no, they have to be unicorn-level and that wouldn't happen unless they were in the biggest cities right off. And then, when they showed up, they didn't even try to follow regulations with a fig leaf and were operating blatantly illegally.
And this is all on top of the fact that Uber and Lyft are skirting minimum wage laws.
Because your "long tail" of poorly functional taxi systems consisted of cities like Los Angeles, Houston, and San Diego. These aren't tiny even when compared to New York. "Most impact" should be the largest city without a functional taxi system. THOSE should have been the focus and then you would have had demand pull into New York and Chicago.
But, no, Uber wanted the "growth hack" of burning VC cash to transfer a bunch of people from the already functional taxi system into the ridesharing system.
> If Tesla et al. had the same impunity and legal cover as Uber, they would be selling everywhere, and we would all be better off.
Laws exist for a reason. Sometimes, such as the case of Tesla, those laws go out of date and should be changed. The medallion system, however, came into existence to avoid malfeasance by drivers. And, as we have seen, as Uber has reduced pay to the drivers, we are getting the exact problems medallions were put in place to solve.
Let's not pretend that it's limited to EVs. EV makers are just the only ones who think they're special and shouldn't need to follow the law. shrug
They've improved certain qualities of cab service here in Austin (like availability) but they've also severely diminished other qualities (like knowing that your driver won't drive straight past the exit because they don't speak English and don't know the roads and don't look at their GPS; or like demand-based pricing).
> People would (and some did!) have greeted them like liberators.
Yeah, because they were running a huge loss-leader to make themselves seem better than the competition until the competition was gone.
I agree that they don't get a pass but... ugh. Their practices, ignoring all law and regulation which apply to them, were not/are not okay no matter where they took place.
That might be true in some areas, but it certainly isn't in others. And nothing was stopping Uber from being a regulated taxi operator. Instead they were just friends using a networking platform to give each other rides (imagine heavy air quotes throughout that sentence)... while the networking platform set the prices and set the costs and took a large cut...
And in reality Uber et al are already far more expensive than taxis were before they took over. They're also subject to most of the same regulation... except the ones that kept pricing down and predictable/plannable... as taxis were, to boot.
Uber did everything they could to hide the true cost of being a driver. Tons of sneaky fees. Gray area for insuring your car. Dropping drivers wages just after they bought their vehicle from a Uber financing program.
There’s a reason the quality of Uber drivers went down, the good ones realized that there was no money to be made once you accounted for all the hidden cost.
So a few got a highly inflated "decent" wage and the people that desperately needed this work are just out of luck because they can't afford a medallion?
Streaming really has no right to not be “convenient”. The only reason it’s reverting to inconvenient is because of beaurocracy and aggressive licensing and copyright enforcement. One can argue that it costs money to make movies and producers need to get that money back, but even older movies which have already been released and made huge profits are no longer available or available on different platforms. Then there is region locking and overlooked movies which are flat-out unavailable. Because of all this, there is widespread piracy, and afaik if you have a good pirate setup streaming is still very convenient.
On the other hand, the convenience and low price of ride-sharing and delivery apps was unsustainable, temporary, and didn’t even really exist in the first place. When you get an Uber it costs like $10 for a 10-minute ride on a good day, and the delivery fees are often as much as the cost of your meal itself. Yet Uber doesn’t even make profit (I don’t know how that works and they’re not bankrupt, they have external funding but are allegedly losing money every year on their actual services). You can’t pirate a free ride or meal.
Streaming services are akin to channel packages from traditional cable. You get an aggregate of content for a price per month. The issue is the point of aggregation is meaningless to the consumer for the popular services (Netflix, Apple tv, prime).
In traditional cable it's done by topic (movie package with HBO, showtime, starz or sports package). With these more popular streaming services it's aggregated by production company and other arbitrary things that are meaningless. Leaving me with 8 thousand movies on a service where I only care about 10, but I pay either way.
The Crunchyroll model of "this is an anime streaming service" has it right for VOD in my opinion, as does WWE.
I think a micro payment setup would work better for something like Netflix. Something like pay $1/month to watch stranger things. $40/month gets you 40 shows per month. Free to watch first 5 episodes or something. I can't think of any better way to truly gauge what's popular than to let people vote with their wallet directly.
Right now with these services it feels like we're subsidizing content that nobody cares about leading to a big murky pool of trash content. Just my 2 cents.
Uber is also going to run into the issue that if they want to charge much more than they do now, it is often more sensible to use some other means of transportation because it will be too expensive and, well, people can trivially do the work themselves.
Home video and taxi-cab service are very different sectors.
Uber has engaged in some pretty "creative" (i.e. unethical) business tactics to muscle their way into the taxi industry while avoiding both regulations and the payment of decent wages. They moved fast, but it was only a matter of time before government regulators (and their own reputation) caught up to them. Transportation is, indeed, something that's going to go back up in price in the short-term, if only because Uber and the Uber-wannabe's were using a business model that was never sustainable. I'd expect considerable contraction of this market as multiple companies fight each other for dwindling profits.
Home streaming, on the other hand, is simply coming off of a pandemic boom. When people were stuck at home, surprise surprise, they watched a lot of TV. Demand will correct to no less than what it was a couple years ago. The problems streaming providers face are entirely self inflicted. e.g. Fragmentation. It's going to remain hard for any single streamer to make as much as Netflix did when Netflix was pretty much the only streamer. Expecting consumers to pay five different companies on a monthly basis for what basically amounts to "channels" is not a delusion likely to persist much longer. We might see cable-TV style aggregation of streaming services take over, enabling users to pay a single monthly bill for all their streaming needs. Unlike transportation, there are free alternatives to streaming (i.e. piracy) that consumers will turn to in increasing numbers if streaming providers stay on their current course. This alone dictates that streaming must become more convenient in the near future, not less so. Showing ads on a service that isn't free is outright suicidal.