I find it ironic that you mentioned taxi drivers, since many were initially collateral damage, and then moved onto drive for Uber or Lyft.

I would say that medallion holders, those with enough capital to pay the almost million dollars a license was running for around 2010, were the ones getting screwed. And if you ask me, I would compare them to whomever invested in SVB. Those will not get their money back.

Just click the link, that's exactly who the article is about. In those specific cases they aren't moving on to Uber and Lyft because they're dead.

They didn't have enough capital for the medallions in hand of course, these were mostly immigrant strivers who worked and toiled and deeply tapped their entire network of friends and family for down payments and were heavily leveraged for the rest.

Then Silicon Valley VC's purposefully made it impossible for them to compete using a massive wash of cheap capital.

What's that you say? The free market is tough, and they should have been able to adequately understand the risks? What can you do if they put their money into something and it didn't pan out right? The game has rules right? No take backs.

Oh.

I think you got it wrong.

Regardless of what these articles may say, the vast majority of medallions are owned by private companies, not independent contractors. Drivers need to be licensed, but medallions are associated to cars, not necessarily people. And this is not a new phenomenon at all [0]

Effectively, Uber and Lyft did more damage to companies than individuals.

Companies that also speculated with the medallion prices by the way, as most were bought and sold privately, not by governments. How do you think they got to cost a million bucks in NYC back in 2013?

[0] https://slate.com/business/2012/06/taxi-medallions-how-new-y...

What’s the substantive difference between the people in this industry who got fucked and the startups and their employees who might get fucked next week that makes you (or the SV online community at least) care about one and not the other.

Tech companies aren't buying scarce titles that weren't mean to be speculated with. They are bank customers. That is the main difference.

That doesn't mean we shouldn't be concerned about those who lost their jobs because highly speculative investment companies went under, but it is clearly not the same.

What’s not the same about it? Explain it to me.

Why should I care more about a startup worker who doesn’t get a paycheck next week than a taxi driver who can no longer feed his family because of new market entrants or a laid off machinist in an industry struggling to compete with subsidized overseas labor.

Make it simple I’m dumb and think each of them has the same claim on human dignity and a financial safety net.

I just did. Not sure what else you want me to say.

If you think that putting money in a reputable bank is the same as gambling a few millions buying government licenses from private hands, then I don’t know what to tell you.

SVB investors aren’t getting their money back either.

Also, this has nothing to do with globalisation. You are mixing things up. And again, kind of ironic that you would blame cheap overseas labour, while sympathising with immigrants driving taxis around NYC. Pick a lane, mate.

I agree with you, except for the comment about Libertarians. Let me assure you, as a member of the Libertarian Party, that we don’t in general like or support government bailout of special interests.

I 100% agree with you about the chutzpah level being really annoying! I also like your comments about the groups of workers adversely affected in the past.

> My feeds are full of sociopathic libertarians calling for government to make sure they never suffer any consequences for their failure to adequately manage risk?

Not sure to whom you’re referring, but they’re not libertarians.

I mean literally nobody is a libertarian by the dictionary definition, there aren't any on the planet. It's just a word people use to describe a value system where governments only help people like them and everyone else gets fucked.

They sure talked a good game though.

No true libertarian.

Show me one.

When you show me a true Scotsman. (I was attempting to make a wry joke.)

Indeed. The difference is that there are actually people living in Scotland.

> I mean literally nobody is a libertarian by the dictionary definition

And is anyone a "democrat" or "republican" or "socialist" (note small "d", "r", and "s") by the dictionary definition?

All I'm saying is that failing to behave strictly according to dictionary definitions is common to all humans not just "libertarians".

Regarding the VC-fueled "onslaught" on the regular old taxi drivers, perhaps you are too young to remember what life was like before Uber and Lyft? Before those companies gave literally millions of people around the world the ability to just up and have a job, with very little hassle? Which obviously has its own issues.

But then wait. Zoom out. The former system did too. The new companies disrupted the absurd, customer-hostile, worker-hostile, cartel-like monopolies those legacy industries had evolved into. Did you ever try getting a taxi in any US city besides Manhattan — not even the rest of NYC — before Uber? It was expensive, frustrating, and completely lacking in integrity.

I remember calling taxis to go the airport in SF before Uber existed and nearly missing my flight on multiple occasions because the government-granted taxi monopoly I ordered from the day before just never showed up at 5am, and oh by the way the company is closed at 5am, so wouldn't answer the phone, but would still try to charge you and tell you you missed your taxi when it showed up and hour late while you were cussing them out the entire drive to the airport in your own car so you could pay the airport parking monopoly absurd rates so you didn't miss your flight. Yep, I want that system back.

Taxis were absolutely terrible before Uber, and they only benefitted taxi companies, the banks that financed them, and then maybe in some cases taxi drivers. Frankly, fuck those old taxi companies. Good riddens.

This is the nature of disruption. Entrepreneurs have a negative experience with an entrenched industry, have a lightbulb moment, raise some money (or not — that path actually exists, though it isn't often discussed here), disrupt the often terrible old industry and create a new market, dominate the new market, and then often stop innovating and focus on keeping out competitors and protecting their rents. Then the cycle repeats.

The disruption cycle existed before Silicon Valley VCs got involved. It is happening right now to Silicon Valley-fueled (and -fueler) Google and (Silicon Valley-fueled) AI LLM chatbots. Google once seemed unstoppable, and suddenly people, including apparently Google, think it's vulnerable. It happened with the iPhone and Nokia and Blackberry! Yet no one will stand up for the poor candy bar phone designers, or soon the poor AdWords salespeople, because something much newer and ostensibly better has come along.

It's literally a tale as old as time, though like any historic cycle it is on increasingly shorter timelines. Protectionist, rent-seeking, and in some cases full-on colluding legacy industries merely try to keep their grip on the market through their own forms of financial and political engineering rather than seeking to innovate on their own.

So the quaint pastoral notion of the innocent taxi companies being obliterated before terrible Uber came along is just flat out wrong. They knew that they were rent-seeking, they knew they could innovate, and they just didn't fix it. Even after Uber came out, for many years they sought — are still seeking? — to defend themselves rather than create a better customer and worker experience.

As for, "if we’re going to regulate let's fucking regulate," that is actually what gets us the entrenched industries described above. Which "we" might collectively agree we want in some cases. We just need to be aware of what the second-order and beyond consequences of that regulation are likely to be. If we regulate in response to this, it is might result in the mega banks taking over smaller ones, continuing the consolidation and obliterating more local banks like SVB.

Or perhaps what you are saying is let's establish regulations where we place the depositors' rights above the rights of the banks? Where we separate investment banking from "consumer" banking again? I agree. And also, good luck with that! It also has second-order and beyond consequences which also could suck. Careful hat you wish for.

One day someone may come on this message board and say:

Perhaps you are too young to remember what life was like before SVB failed? Before banks were made to be more responsible with depositor money so people wouldn't be hurt, and before the sociopathic fake-libertarian culture of Silicon Valley elites was finally dead and buried along with a few of their Tahoe cabins and a couple companies that advanced innovation by tricking people into ordering food from existing restaurants on fake websites?

I remember, they will say, how there was a bank that was so dominated by cronyism and collusion that they were forcing companies all from one very narrow sector to keep large uninsured balances in one bank while they bet all that money on long-dated securities for some inexplicable reason.

Remember how the bank got people to go along with this insane plan by giving the people with fiduciary responsibility for these company treasury decisions mortgages, even when the banking market in general had deemed them too high risk?

Wow that was crazy. Anyways they died. This is the nature of disruption. Entrepreneurs have a negative experience with an entrenched crony-driven legacy industry, have a lightbulb moment, and then build banks that don't do shit like that.

So the quaint pastoral notion of the innocent startups and VC podcast hosts being obliterated by the terrible negligent actions of the government is just wrong. They knew they were mispricing risk and they just didn't fix it. Even after their bank failed they sought -- are still seeking? -- to defend the status quo rather than realize a justified loss and create a better and safer banking experience.

I look forward to reading these comments in the future.

Just for reference I've been building on the web since about 1994. It's a lovely perspective that makes it much easier to realize just how fundamentally full of shit all these guys are on this topic today.

> advanced innovation by tricking people into ordering food from existing restaurants on fake websites?

Just want to point out that what you are describing is called a "ghost kitchen", and it’s a bizarre and terrible idea that never made any sense in the restaurant environment, because the existing storefront could barely keep up with the original orders, let alone having to use a separate menu with different ingredients and preparation style to keep pace with to-go orders. Whoever it was that came up with this idea really needs to take a step back and see how disastrous the idea has been for retail food establishments.

> Did you ever try getting a taxi in any US city besides Manhattan — not even the rest of NYC — before Uber? It was expensive, frustrating, and completely lacking in integrity.

Yes, lots of times and you’re overstating it substantially. The only reason Uber was cheaper was that they were heavily subsidizing each ride. Once they stopped that, amazingly, prices rose to match or exceed cab fares.

The specific area where Uber was better was that many cab companies would illegally refuse service to black neighborhoods. Uber deserves credit for breaking that but these days I’m hearing more anecdotes about drivers skipping pickups so I’m not sure that’s permanent.