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So why Lyft get none of the protests? I think you are mixing unrelated subjects. Uber final product is good for society. And other companies can provide the sa

• davidf18 9y ago
  Uber is the largest player by far, so they are an easy target for frustrations and for incumbents. "Uber" is almost a generic term for a iPhone hailable vehicle. Generally, there is market competition for drivers. For example, Lyft for those drivers who are unhappy with Uber. You have stated that in your city, São Paulo, there are 3 good companies. If one company mistreats drivers, they would go to a competing firm and the firm would lose revenue.
  • soneca 9y ago
    That's why I trust capitalism. Its dynamics allowed Uber to create a market, but also keep it in check for bad practices.
    • tanderson92 9y ago
      Do you think the same about telecom monopolies and the negative externalities of fossil fuel companies?
      • abfan1127 9y ago
        telecom monopolies are government enshrined, so not capitalism. Negative externalities of burning fossil fuels (plastics are a fossil fuel product) are allowed because government allows people to pollute "some"... not capitalism.
        • phinnaeus 9y ago
          I don't understand your second sentence. Government currently allows some pollution. Should government disallow all pollution?
          • riffraff 9y ago
            OP is saying that government allow a certain amount of pollution. A government could decide to forbid pollution altogether (whatever that means) and still maintain a capitalistic economic system. We have generally forbidden dumping barrels of spent oil in rivers, for example. Likewise, a non-capitalistic system can forbid or not pollution.
          • theseatoms 9y ago
            To the extent it owns land, yes.
        • tanderson92 9y ago
          Perhaps the defenders of capitalism should have to account for the effect their economic system has on the government and its ability to properly regulate the economy given the immense private wealth that the owners can use to influence policy and politicians. It is an economic and political system, not purely an economic system.
          • nnfy 9y ago
            You're conflating free markets with capitalism. And once laws are influenced by capitalists, the market is no longer free. 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.
            • tanderson92 9y ago
              The free market determined that that was the fair price for government policies to be bent towards industries' or actor's will. You'll forgive people critiquing the economic system if it freely and naturally leads to the ills we find objectionable. 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.
    • pikzen 9y ago
      "Keep it in check" 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
      • cgmg 9y ago
        Lowering standards of living? Lolwhat? As a previous comment pointed out, Uber created a consumer surplus of almost $7 billion in 2015 alone.
    • CalChris 9y ago
      Capitalism didn't force Kalanick to resign.
      • eljimmy 9y ago
        Well, technically it did. Investors, i.e. the capital, pressured him out.
        • CalChris 9y ago
          capitalism -- an economic and political system in which a country's trade and industry are controlled by private owners for profit, rather than by the state. 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.
          • tw04 9y ago
            I would imagine they've seen a revenue decline from all the bad press. Furthermore, there's no way he wasn't directly involved in the Otto lawsuit, which isn't the governments doing.
            • linkregister 9y ago
              According to recent reporting in Bloomberg, there was a temporary dip in market share due to the #deleteuber campaign, which has since recovered. Both companies have grown considerably over that time period. Lyft's ridesharing growth in the U.S. has been much higher than Uber's. 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.
    • gcburn2 9y ago
      You're catching a lot of flak for this, but as long as there is diverse competition, you're right. I used to bounce back and forth between Uber and Lyft based purely on price, but now I almost exclusively use Lyft because I'm not a fan of some of Uber's practices.
    • jsemrau 9y ago
      Societal norms forced him to resign. In other parts of this world with more patriarchal and authoritarian governments the leadership style might have been accepted.
  • nullnilvoid 9y ago
    Uber is the largest in the US, not across the world. Didi provides way more rides than Uber any single day.
    • lettergram 9y ago
      Kind of unfair to compare Didi (or any Chinese company) with the free market alternatives. If you're given state sponsorship from one of the largest countries, then you should easily be able to do more rides than Uber.
      • komali2 9y ago
        There's also Per Capita to consider. Obviously an anything in China will have more actual humans using it - there's a billion of them there.
        • sunbuntu 9y ago
          There are more people in India than China so that is a bit rich.
      • linkregister 9y ago
        I don't think that UberChina's failure to win against Didi was due to state sponsorship. Didi had a better product tailored to the Chinese market, better operations people who conducted local campaigns in more cities, and only one market to compete in, as opposed to Uber's worldwide competition. 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.
        • euyyn 9y ago
          > a better product tailored to the Chinese market What were the differences?
• wgyn 9y ago
  Actually such a calculation is possible (of consumer surplus), though perhaps some would argue against one or another part of the methodology. See: http://freakonomics.com/podcast/uber-economists-dream/ http://freakonomics.com/podcast/uber-economists-dream/ or http://www.nber.org/papers/w22627 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.
  • mcguire 9y ago
    Tl;dr: Uber needs to raise its prices.
    • Robelius 9y ago
      They probably felt comfortable taking a loss while they expanded more on these subsidized prices. As long as they don't get involved in harassment claims and theft of a competitors IP they should be in a strong position to start raising prices....
      • euyyn 9y ago
        Oh, wait!
    • davidf18 9y ago
      I would conclude that Uber is spending extra money to expand the market just as Amazon took losses to expand their market. They don't need to raise prices, but eventually reduce overhead per ride.
• pascalxus 9y ago
  if that's the case, you'd have to protest lots of start ups and companies in silicon valley. There's no shortage of toxic workplaces. I think it's a good think to break down monopolies and open up competition.
  • euyyn 9y ago
    > if that's the case, you'd have to protest lots of start ups and companies in silicon valley. There's no shortage of toxic workplaces. 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.
• ajhurliman 9y ago
  The same pushy, aggressive culture that made their some of their employees' lives awful also made it possible to get excellent service that reduces tons of drunk driving and generally improves people's lives. 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.
  • bighi 9y ago
    > The same pushy, aggressive culture that made their some of their employees' lives awful also made it possible to get excellent service that reduces tons of drunk driving and generally improves people's lives. So you're basically saying that stuff like treating women like shit was NECESSARY to provide a good "taxi" service?
    • curyous 9y ago
      Not caring about what other people think is necessary for doing pioneering work.
      • huslage 9y ago
        That's completely wrong headed. What people think is entirely the reason that something is "pioneering" or not. How businesses comport themselves and treat their various constituencies is part and parcel of their ongoing success.
      • the_cat_kittles 9y ago
        "i have to be an asshole to succeed!" - people who are assholes who are making excuses for themselves.
    • metamet 9y ago
      The sexism isn't the only problem within the company. It's the easiest to criticize, because it's obvious how stupid and absurd it is--and how there is no excusing it, but I Uber has done a bunch of other things that reflect this same mindset.
• subterfudge44 9y ago
  > Uber practices as a company are toxic for its employees and some of the toxicity leak to society. Why are Uber employees not leaving and joining Lyft for the lower pay ? How does Uber failing benefits Uber employees ? Lyft is not even close second to Uber in terms of total rides in USA.
• geoelectric 9y ago
  Once upon a time I heard a concept in motorcycling of the sacrificial jerk. This was when you deliberately rode behind someone who rode like an asshole. In turn they provided the upper boundary of your willingness to break the speed limit and for you to ride like an asshole, in hopes that they'd attract the ire of the police instead of you. 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.
  • jbob2000 9y ago
    I call this the "pace car" when driving. You can do anything the pace car does because he'll get caught first - he sets the pace. Uber is the pace car and the police pulled him over, Lyft saw this and applied their brakes.
    • mojomark 9y ago
      I've always heard it called a 'rabbit' [1], but I like 'sacrifficial jerk' and will probably use that from now on. 1. http://radartest.com/Top-5-Tips.asp http://radartest.com/Top-5-Tips.asp
      • WaxProlix 9y ago
        We always called this guy the 'red herring', to throw off cops.
        • dzhiurgis 9y ago
          We call it a horse in Lithuanian, because it's always in front of the carriage. And no, we don't use horses anymore.